CCCT with Brian Burke, Owner from Plans4Less Video

CCCT sat down with Brian Burke, Owner from Plans4Less.com, an online store that provides architects, engineers and builders printed plans, both black & white and color, at the lowest prices and fastest turnaround times available. National coverage area. When it has to be on paper, it has to be Plans4Less.com.

www.plans4less.com

#plans #projects#construction #architects #engineers #builders

Transcription

Hey there Commercial Construction Coffee Talk fans, thanks for chiming in. My name is David Course, and I’m your host. I’m also the publisher and editor of Commercial Construction and Renovation Magazine. This is what it used to look like. Oh, it’s an archive. It’s got my action, my mailing label on it. This is March April 2014. Got one to Long GM, a Little River Casino Resort window, awesome, uh, but it’s always nice to hold them in the hand, you know. We went digital in August of 2021, or actually May of 2020 is when we went digital, and haven’t looked back since. Let’s see, uh, what my picture—oh, I was looking to see what I was looking like. I got a little more hair in this picture, but I was looking for a dinner or event, I think down in Tampa when we had our Summit down at the Hyatt. We took everybody out fishing before they went back home and hit the airport to catch their flights. But it was an awesome time down there in Tampa and great hospitality. But it feels like yesterday I was just doing that stuff, you know? Boom, here we are, you know, nine years later, you know, coming up on 10, and um, it’s just crazy, you know? I can’t believe it’s already August, you know? Here in the South, we’ve already started school, like, they’ve been in school about a week or so, and, you know, the buses are on the street, and, you know, I’m from up North, so after Labor Day, you go back to school, so, you know, I know that, you know, up North, it’s happening. But hope everybody’s having a great week. You know, you got the weekend ahead. You know, it’s kind of quiet, you know? You got the guys on the baseball diamond, you know, playing b-ball in the summer heat in the dog days of summer, and, you know, Braves were hanging in there. We’re in first place, you know, killing it. But you never know what’s gonna happen. You gotta make it to the playoffs to see if you’re gonna win it all. You gotta have momentum, you gotta be healthy, and, you know, but other than that, you know, you got the professional lacrosse league.

I got my lacrosse carv on today, as usual, but other than that, it’s been, you know, kind of a quiet summer, you know, and it’s been beautiful here in Atlanta. It’s rain, had some big boomers coming, came through the storm this morning, but it’s clearing out, and probably gonna have to go out on the boat later today or tonight, you know? It’s been kind of rainy here all week, and had some wicked storms, they come in in the afternoon. It’s been really hot, and, you know, the heat builds up, and boom, you know, it’s crazy, it can pour here, you go two miles away, and it didn’t even rain, yeah. So, I got a gentleman, his name’s Brian Burke. He’s the owner of Plans for Less, headquartered in Connecticut, but actually, he’s in the Big Apple today. So, Brian, say hello to our audience out there on Commercial Construction Coffee Talk. Hello, everyone. Thanks, David, for having me here. It’s glad to be here and watch the podcast many times and glad to be on it. Thank you. Hey, hey, listen, the way Brian got on here, saw the podcast, he sent me a note, and I said, hey, I haven’t had a plan guy on there. So, let’s get you on there. So, listen, construction’s booming right now, and any way that you can make the process more smoother and efficient, you know, budgets and, you know, planning, you know, especially in retail if you’re, you know, everything is designed on the opening of a new store and all the circulars are built and everything goes back. So, planning, some planning, all that is so crucial to getting the project done on time, on budget, and hopefully everything runs smoothly.

And that’s why I have Brian on here today, you know, to talk about what his firm offers, you know, people out there that are in the commercial construction sector, you know, whether you’re a retail, restaurant, hospitality, cannabis, craft brew, I can go down the list, federal, you know, it’s all the same, it’s all building. So, and everybody’s business, that’s all I Know is everybody I talk to that, you know, if they could find more PMs or superintendents, they would be, you know, that much more busier. But that’s the way it goes with the labor shortages, you know, these days. So Brian, the way this work is, I do my, we do our interview in three parts. You’ll tell us your story, where you grew up, brothers, sisters. I know you got a brother here, you know, local here in Sugar Hill and Suwanee area. And then we’ll talk about Lessons Learned From the last three years that our listeners out there in Commercial Construction Coffee Talk might find of interest. And then you’ll leave one positive thought or phrase with our listeners and your contact info. And then we’ll finish out. So with that said, Brian, the floor is yours, tell us your story. All right, David, thanks so much. Coming out of high school didn’t know what I was gonna do, was not college material, and my neighbor is an engineer and he designed wastewater treatment plant systems, and he said, why don’t you come intern at the engineering office for the summer? And I said, okay. So I went down to his office and he had a blueprint machine in his office, and I ran all the plans that we needed for the engineering firm and made all the copies and the submittal booklets that he needed. And he said after the summer, you wanna stay on? I said, yeah, I like it, you know, I like the guys in the engineering firm. And, you know, 17 years old, and he said, well, let’s open to the public and he said we’re gonna open the public and you’re going to run it. I’ll teach you everything you need to know about running a business, and I worked for him for eight years and we grew to six full-time people and literally by the time I was 25 years old, I had, you know, seven eight years of experience and how to do marketing, how to do advertising, hiring people, securing equipment, you know, interaction with clients, right?

How do I get new clients doing cold calls, you know, man, he just pushed me right onto the world and said, you know, he watched and we measured every single year like what are we doing? How’s it going? It was hands off, which was really good, but when he needed to be involved, he got involved. And eight years later, you know, at 25, I thought I knew everything and I went out on my own and I had one company for about eight years and then I decided to go off in another direction. We had a local Reprographics company and we were doing great but I wanted to start something different and I started Plans for Less. I saw just a different direction I wanted to go and I pivoted and I decided that we were going to have a different business model. In the business model I went, I looked at was 1-800 Flowers, my mom was a florist before she had passed away and I was just wondering FTD, how does FTD work, Mom? How’s it, how’s the flower shop work? How do you get business from all over the country? And she said, well, we’re part of FTD. And I said, well, I want to be the FTD of blueprinting. And how do you do that? Like that was, that was one summer I was sitting on the beach and just thinking about the way that we can do this is we can advertise all over and not tell anybody where we are. Just have a 1 800 number, have an email address, have a website that doesn’t say that we’re located in Connecticut or Texas or California.

Do online marketing and we launched it and you know how many years later now is it’s 15 years later and we have business all over the country and you know a lot of people ask, well, where are you located because for the most part they don’t know, they were online and they get their drawings the next day or the second. So that’s how it all started, started an engineering firm and a little full engineering firm in Connecticut and you know, it’s some other ideas that come along the way that made me pivot to do Plans for Less. Nice, nice. You know, college isn’t for Everybody, you know, my son went to trade school, you know, now he’s working in Boeing, he’s on the flight line working on 787s and, you know, he… and I tell people, look, if you come out of school, you know, unless you have someone like you had the plan guy that, you know, hey, come over for the engineering firm, you know, run the, you know, run the printer, I tell people, look, unless you have some gig that’s kind of there or, you know, you’ve got to… Elite someplace, you know, you should go in the military, get three square meals a day, you’ll learn something, you’ll come out, you’ll have a trade, and you will be marketable and, um, uh, so, uh, listen, I went to Florida school, so all the schools out there, I’m not pounding on you guys, okay, but college is not for everybody, and, uh, going out and learning it’s exciting that actually that, that, that, that, that firm, the engineering firm, said, hey, come on with us, you know, so that, you know, timing in business is everything, and, you know, and look where you are now, and, uh, and be in on the web. Looks, I… I haven’t looked back after, you know, I was scared to death after being a publisher in print and face-to-face events forever that, you know, you know, with the shutdown and, you know, I had… I pivot, I used that word, I’m so tired of it, but the bottom line is we pivoted too and, uh, and you know, we went, we had a digital magazine forever, I was lucky I had it even though I ignored it for all those years, I was lucky I had it because I didn’t know how many all those pages of content, but now I don’t miss the post office, I don’t miss, uh, you know, the printer, you know, I don’t know if you know, I don’t miss any of that stuff, I haven’t looked back and, you know, we’ve got millions of people a month that hit our site looking for content and all sorts of stuff and, uh, you know, being on the web, there’s eight billion people on the planet and, uh, you don’t need to know where you… you could be located anywhere the minute you’re on the web, believe it or not, you know, like if you were, you know, I’m in Sugar Hill, little dinky little town north of Atlanta, here.

I am a little publisher but people all over the world send me stuff, you know, when I go to bed at night, I try to keep trying to get my emails cleaned out and, uh, so forth but by the time I wake up, I have people from the other side of the world that have sent me stuff, you know, or they’ll start doing what when I’m getting off at night, you know, and, uh, uh, uh, when I’m done and I’m looking and I’m like, I’ll start trickling in from, you know, Asia Australia wherever it might be and they’re sending me content and, uh, it’s crazy, you know, but the minute you’re on the web you’re a global company it doesn’t matter where you’re located and, uh, that’s… that’s the… that’s the magic of the web. So, um, let’s talk about, uh, you know, three years ago, you know, three three and a half years ago or so everybody’s booming construction was cranking cranes all I don’t what city you’re in there were cranes all over the place and all of a sudden boom everything, you know, comes to a standstill, you know, talk about how you, you know, as a digital company as well how you weather the storm and helped your clients, you know, get stuff done, uh, obviously being on digitally but you know a lot of these companies are in different municipalities and states and everybody had different regulations, you know, how you help them weather the storm as well, you know, to get their projects done, you know, with what you offer there at Plans for Less. Yeah, that was an interesting time, um, especially being in the Northeast, New York shutdown, Connecticut shut down, a lot of our clients shut down, they weren’t doing any work, we have a lot of work at hospitals and universities.

And for all the reasons there was no building going on and, uh, you know, we didn’t know how long this was going to last and what it was going to mean for us as a company and I thought geez this is a bit of a scary time it reminded me of 2008, right, and we weathered 2008 and we learned a lot in 2008 so I think we were ready for it, um, another kind of blip on the radar there but but there was still so many unanswered questions about it. We just decided as a group, I kept everybody on staff, we didn’t… we didn’t let anybody go, we kept everybody employed, we stayed open, and luckily we have worked all across the country because other areas of the country weren’t doing the same as New England and the Northeast and shutting down, there was buildings still going on in other parts of the country, so to have a client base outside of the area certainly helped us out. But the one thing that we did do, David, is we spent some time stopping what we’re doing, really looking at what we’re doing, and we came up with two new concepts that now have proven to be so successful for us and our clients. We decided to, you know, look at the prime model from Amazon and we rolled out Plans for Less Prime right in the middle of that, and we literally contacted all of our clients and said for $95 we’re going to give you free ground shipping for a year, and we had hundreds of clients sign up for Prime, and we’re now on our third or fourth resigning of clients to keep buying Prime every year, the annual membership, and they keep subscribing to it, and it really helped out because, uh, people working from home all of a sudden they weren’t in the office, so the construction companies were saying, well, we want our project managers to work on these projects, they’re going to ship the drawings to their house, so we were doing a ton of that and we still are.

And, uh, so Prime was very successful for us, it’s a great case study, we’ve… we’ve watched clients utilize us more because they’re taking the shipping cost out of it, we’ve already fixed the rate for their price for their plans, right, it’s full-size plans are locked in a dollar fifty per page, half size depending whether you want color or black and white, what size of half size, it’s various rates but at a dollar fifty per page, and they’re going to bid on the project and not to worry about the shipping cost, it became a no-brainer for them to sign up for Prime and they just weren’t thinking about it, and they were scanning their drawings two days later or a day later depending on where they’re located in the US and, uh, uh, Prime has been a huge success for us, and then on the back of Prime, we rolled out Enterprise and Enterprise includes Prime and it also gives the clients the ability to get color drawings at the same price as black and white for an annual subscription as well and that’s $500 a year so it gets Prime, it gets color drawings the same rate as black and white, you know, I think we’re just trying to make it easier for our clients so it was a… it was a good thing at the end of the day I mean some of this was a good thing it was was hard but for us as a company it got us to reorganize we we did a lot of renovations in our office and we came up with two new two new programs that are still running today that are very successful. Do you think if the shutdown didn’t happen you would have come out with a Prime and Enterprise, you would have left that on the table, you wouldn’t even know it was on the table, right, I think it made us pause and stopped, we stopped, um, and really took… took a look at what what we were doing and it was, uh, and I think we always try to do that, right, you always try to get together with your team and have marketing and sales meetings and say, you know, what are we doing, what can we do better, what’s… what are we missing, and but this really was a great exercise for us and to watch it come out of the gate and be successful right out of the gate and now carry on years later, um, very, very lucky that we came up with her we worked on it, I won’t say that we’re lucky we worked on it and we… we had some… we had proof of concept now so but we we had that come out of there.

Hey listen, I… I would I would have never become a digital guy if if the if the… if the roller coaster wouldn’t even have started, you know, I mean I was humming along I just had my Summit, my 10th anniversary and had done a couple of receptions, I was in Milwaukee looking at hotels for our executive treats that we do in the fall and uh when everything shut down I was fighting with my printer because I told him, look, half the offices I’m gonna mail these magazines to or shut down. People are furloughed, you know, some people were getting them at their homes and so forth, but you know, they were… they weren’t technically working. Um, in March, and my putting out, I was bi-monthly at the time, my magazine and we… I bit the bullet, I said, okay fine I’ll just print the magazine and I threw it out there and then I sat back I had very a lot of sleepless nights in April of 2020. try and just you know figure out you know what I was going to do, you know, in my editor and my and my artists were like let’s go digital we have all this content blah blah blah and this and that, you know, being a print, you know when you make that decision you don’t know if people are going to stick with you then you know still people you know still like holding it in their hands or, you know, are they gonna go go for it digitally and the biggest thing I’ve found the people that I’ve had as guests are just people that I’ve talked to and clients you know whether they’re end users or Engineers contractors vendors so many people learn so much about themselves as well as their company and that the ones that were flexible that didn’t have their cement shoes on that you know were slugging along and just like we’re just going to chug along what we’re doing the ones who really took a look and took a deep breath and didn’t make knee-jerk reactions but actually thought things through quickly you know because time time is money in business that uh, they they found out that actually even with their their staff maybe working out of the house or depending on what state you were in you know with the regulations um that they could actually so many people said they were they proved themselves they’re more productive they don’t have the Chit Chat that the water cooler uh you know they may maybe they lost all of their company culture but a lot of people had like some of the best years of you know during that time period I mean it’s crazy it’s crazy to say that but uh you know if this year I think last year I was talking to people and they’re like yeah I would have even had a better year last year but you know with the labor shortage uh I can’t find PMS or supers so I didn’t want to I didn’t want to take on any more business but if I if I had more PMS than supers.

I would have you know I would fit more I would have been a bigger chunk out of that apple and uh um and and you’re right you know listen depending on where you were really determined you know how busy you were going to be unless your business was made essential you know like a hot like a healthcare facility can’t build that thing in a year it’s going to take a couple three or four years to build a Hospital campus so it really depended on where you were and uh you know if you were like up in the north like if you were working on a Federal Highway project like Connecticut I’m sure they still have orange barrels on I-95 am I right because between New York and Boston they’re doing construction you know in uh in Connecticut you know on the highway so but if you were doing a highway project you probably you know it’s open you don’t have to worry about social distancing and six feet and all that stuff where they got the number I have no idea but the bottom line is is that uh uh you’re probably were able to do it now if you were doing a you know a plum out like a bathroom retrofit or whatever where you were you know close in depending on what state you were in you probably you know you might not have gotten it here in Georgia we were open so you probably would have gotten that done but you still had to put the protocols in place you want your people to be safe no one and really no one even knew if any of that stuff even worked but to be honest with you I’m glad all that stuff got got put in there I mean the last thing you know the most important thing to me you know my family’s been in construction since 1888 in outside of Philadelphia we’re in demolition you know my cousins are are running the company right now and uh I did my time at 16 got my license everybody had to go in the scrap yard and you know I shoveled asbestos I laid railroad I did everything you know so uh that that was the glory of the game a grandson in you know in a construction company hey you’re 16 you’re getting your butt up you got to be at you know Uncle Frank’s the PM that you know on at the scrap yard you know and he was a mean son of a gun and but I’m glad he was because he was tough you know I wanted to get everything done because I didn’t want to deal with Uncle Frank you know but the bottom line is is that uh, you know in in essence that whole gig over the last three and a half years probably made so many more companies sufficient they they found their their bread and butter and improved it and they came out with new products and stuff just like you did and that you probably you know wouldn’t even known if that was in there like I became a digital guy I thought I knew a lot about digital over the last year I’ve taken three boot camps you know I’ve learned about catch EBT before it even became you know what it is today with AI I’ve learned so much about digital that uh you know I’m glad I made the pivot.

I didn’t even know I was gonna even take these classes you know three years ago right now I’m starting to implement the stuff you know on my website and I’m gonna you know kind of roll it out to some of my clients and say Hey you know if you don’t you know I know you have a marketing guy and I know you have this and that but you really should look at this because you know everybody’s on the web they’re not getting off it you know people say oh the pendulum goes back and forth oh my God verything’s gonna be on the web down the road I I say it and um uh but uh still people have to to go out they got to get stuff done on the construction sites and uh and and listen get your plan so I just got my plans I I’m sorry to say I didn’t do a reprogram I did I didn’t want the Office Depot you know that’s where I went and got my you know for our empty nest house I needed a one for the HOA and uh one for the architect you know that was on you know to approve my plan so I I forget what they were right in there Buck 50 a page uh you know we did them in you know black and white we didn’t each other you know the architect did the cads in color you know in 3D and all that yeah uh so it’s uh you know it but you can’t get anything done with that plant you know I mean I was driving down I was just driving down the highway the other day and I was watching I’m watching this uh these Town Homes get and get put in there putting a new subdivision across the street and there was a guy up on the roof and he was looking to plant you know he’s tied on he’s got his he’s got his tether on and I’m sitting at the light and I’m looking up at him and he’s looking at his plans helping them now yeah it’s really sunny outside looking on a tablet or whatever it’s very tough so we had his plans up there you know looking where does this trust go or whatever whatever he was doing up there but anyway he was looking at his plans I just thought it was really interesting you know see a guy up there he’s looking at his plans he’s tethered and uh you can’t get anything done without it you know and you can’t you can’t we were told you know 15 years ago that we’re going out of the business as soon as FTP sites came out right and you were printing more now than ever before it’s just different it’s just I’m not praying that the same number of sets for each client for printing you know a few sets for each client now but we have so many more clients now with our fixed rate pricing and our Integrations with some Construction Company software technology which I’d love to talk about where we really have taken off with our business being partners with some big construction tech companies and uh but everybody needs plans and we’re printing more than ever and you know I don’t think it’s going anywhere it’s a good compliment to the digital side I mean you can still have your digital you know your email and your PDF files on your iPad and you’re looking at the iPad and your computer screen and your laptop but uh it’s nothing like having a roll of drawings to roll around the job site with and markup let’s say it’s a publisher in Norm magazine we have a report every month you know whether it’s on flooring like uh this month it’s flooring so even though I do Digi you know we have the form up online because I used to you know fax the form or I would email the form in a word doc and people would fill it out and hieroglyphics fix and I have chicken scratches handwriting so I I can’t even read my own you should see some of the handwriting like I’m like is that an eight or an o or is that a six so and then you’ll have a typo in the magazine.

I’m like well I had to I had to I had to figure out you never even you know came back to my email I was trying to confirm stuff but now we do it online but still when I proof you know I put my readers on I put the section out and I just look at the Excel file but I’m looking at the I’m looking at a print document and a piece of paper now I recycle them but uh you know and you know if it’s only on one side I flip it over and I stick it in there because you know but I hate wasting paper uh you know I’m a green I hate you know I’m a green guy but uh the bottom line is I still use you know paper even though I’m digital I’m still using paper you know to get things done to make sure and it’s just so much easier to prove with a piece of paper than it is to do it on you know online so there’s still goes back that print aspect to me and and just like we lay out the magazine I still lay the magazine out like I’m going to print it because if someone does have it you know we have this print demand and I didn’t even think about print demand that’s what happened you know I wasn’t gonna do printer print on demand I was just gonna you know print it and I’d send people copies in the printer and all that and uh but you know it’s a blessing in disguise I never judge a book by its cover I’m always going to look at the glass half you know half full not half empty and uh you know that that whole the whole last three years two things I learned a lot about my business like many of just like yourself you came out with new with new things and and um I found that there’s more to life than just work and and uh you know that yeah and I think a lot of people out there have figured that out as well that you you know there’s you know life is short as you get older days go quicker you don’t get as much sleep and they’re just like I said I can’t believe it’s already August you know now it was just January 1st and we’re ringing in the new year and now we’re coming into uh the Fallen boom.

It’ll be Christmas and you know they’re just flying by I just turned 60 this year and uh it’s uh it I feels like I was in Prep School in New Jersey you know uh you know in 1980s or whatever it’s just amazing uh how quickly you know time flies but uh the whole digital thing and and you know keeping people happy and that story with uh you know the two products tell us about the tell us about the other uh gig that you had going on that you want to talk about with the yeah you know David we were uh thinking about the business and how to grow the business and um one of the things that I was thinking about when I was on vacation was was that like how are we going to scale this business um and one of the ways that we talk about scaling the business from a print standpoint was to go out and find print partners right so we belong to a couple associations of independent printers and yeah I would go some in the meetings and talk to some of those guys that ran print shops just like me just different parts of the country and then there’s some larger uh of our competitors and we teamed up with some of them so when we have some work that’s coming in we’re not necessarily printing in Connecticut we’re printing in Dallas or printing in Minnesota or we’re printing in Chicago therefore that the clients are located in different areas they’re still getting the same turnaround time through our Print Partners became the marketing and PR for our print partners. So, they were getting business through us, through Plans for Less, and we would sub it to them.

They would print it, they would make it look like it came from Plans for Less, they’d wrap it up with our wrapping and send it to our clients. So we figured out that part, we figured out the distribution part, but the other part was how do we… we can’t go out and visit every single construction company in the U.S., but we can reach out to the companies that they use, software companies that they use every day to bid on projects and to build projects. And we spent some time reaching out to a bunch of… of software firms, I’m talking of pitching our idea that we’re going to fix rate pricing, we have our distribution model, it’s already set up, so we have the… we have the pricing, we have the process, we have the model. And we ended up talking to a gentleman called James… James Benell. And at the time, James Benham was running SmartBid. And I know James, yeah, and I pitched it to him. And I had caught him on a… on a Tuesday night, I think, and he was watching his daughters, and he said, “Do you know who you’re talking to?” And I said, “No, I just called the 1-800 number.” He’s like, “Well, I’m just, you know, I saw Connecticut come up on my phone, and we have a new client in Connecticut, so I thought it was a customer calling.” So he picked up the line, we talked for about 20 minutes, he said, “Call me in the morning, pitch this idea to me.” And I pitched it to him, and within six months, we had a button in SmartBid. And it’s still there today, and it says, if you want to order hard copy plans, you click on our local Plans for Less. And any SmartBid user can utilize Plans for Less right through SmartBid. They don’t have to upload files, the files are already there, they’re deciding on the bid on the project, they just click the link, it uploads the files that they want to order, we get the order confirmation, we call them up, talk to them about when do they want them, give them the price, you know, we do the transaction. And to meet people like James Benham and Josh Bone and Rob McKinney back some years ago with the Contact Trio, I was very fortunate to not only meet them, become friends with all of those guys, and then that rolled into us getting into a relationship with guys over at Procore. And Procore, I’m happy to say, we just… I have our first printing embedded app is now on Procore, and it’s ours, Plans for Less is in Procore. And any Procore user, GC or subcontractor, can now take advantage of installing the Plans for Less app into their system and ordering plans right through Procore.

So what we’ve tried to do, David, is try to make this process of ordering drawings for anybody very easy. We’ve set the pricing, we have the distribution model, and now you can order right from software companies like SmartBid or Procore. Yeah, we had… we had James speak at our… at our Summit, I’m gonna say it was back in like… 14 or 15. It was a little ways back, but he did an awesome presentation, you know, right when he was getting started out, and… and he did a great job and… um, I think he was with the retail contractors, I forget which one, but he was at… he was one of our, I’ll have to look back in the archives, and… but, uh, once again, it feels like it was yesterday he did that thing. Yeah, that’s a… that’s a name from the past of that that’s… blew out, I’m like, “Tell me…” Oh, no, no, I was thinking about where do I know that, I’m like, “Oh yeah, you spoke at our event way back when.” Yeah, he… yeah, we got together, he was in New Haven speaking one night, we got together for dinner, he’s like, “I love this, Brian, I’m gonna put you in the software.” And we ended up going to his sponsoring and be a part of his user conference for three or four years, meeting all the users, speaking in front of the users about our product, and, you know, we were… we were one of their, what you would call their first integration Partners, back before that term was even being used as it is today by some of the software company that want everything to be, you know, once you’re in their software, they want you to utilize all of the apps that they have available, for their users.

And, uh, so we were very early on, I was very lucky to meet him and become great friends with him now and… and… but he gave us a chance. That’s kind of how it rolled into doing these integrations with other software companies, and we’re always looking for new ones. Do you know how many times I… I’ll see a number and I think it’s someone else, and I’ll pick it up and… and it won’t be who I thought it was, but I’ll have a discussion, and you know, in an alert, you know, “Hey, you know, we should just do a Zoom call or whatever.” And it’s amazing, your phone, hey everybody out there, this is your best tool ever. I’m not saying because I’m a digital guy, I’m just telling you from experience that you don’t have, you know, a… a… you know, a cell phone, a personal cell phone in… in your phone for your clients or their Gmail or whatever, uh, you gotta put that stuff in, you know. If you don’t have a digital business card, you’re crazy because you can have so much on there, you can email and they can tag it, they can create it with a push of a button, and it’s the most amazing thing, your phone, this can connect you to the eight billion people that are on the planet, and, uh, you know, don’t take it for granted, you should learn how to use it as a tool because, uh, people just like, like, you know, uh, like Brian said, “Hey, you know, he made a call, I just make a call,” and there’s the owner, he picked up, you know, by accident, and then it led to something else, and look where you’re, you know, where it led to today. So, you know, never know but the phone is your best tool ever and every day, you know, my… I, I probably make 10 calls a day, I pick the people that I want to have conversations I know, and I normally won’t do, I look just like having a phone call with them, I do plenty of Zoom and all, you know, on these, you know, teams and all this stuff but, um, having a phone call with someone is amazing because I shoot way too many emails during the day and, uh, you know, Zoom is great but, you know, just having a pleasurable phone call while a guy’s driving or whatever, uh, you know, you can kill two birds with one stone and, um, uh, it’s an amazing thing so, uh, excellent story.

I really appreciate you sharing with that and, and you brought it back in the past so, um, if, uh, if, uh, if someone wanted to, uh, you know, reach out to you, you know, as far as, uh, you know, to talk about, uh, you know, what your services are, how would someone reach out to you, you know, with our audience out there with the Commercial Construction Coffee Talk? Yeah, go to our website and go to our Contact Us page, or you can reach out to me at brian@plans4less.com, email me, uh, you can call the 1-800 number on our site, it’s right to my phone, so that’s… you can find me on LinkedIn as well. So we’re… we’re very, uh, we’re all over the place on LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter, so you can, uh, you can search for us and you’ll find this pretty easy. They… if anybody wants to reach me, I’m at davidc@ccr-mag.com. Uh, listen, Brian reached out to me, sold a podcast, he reached out to me, boom, here he is. So, uh, you know, if you’ve got… listen, send me, we post stuff all day long, you know, we’re… we’re a destination site, you know, we had another couple million people hit our site last month, you know, looking for content, uh, and, uh, we promote also, you know, it could be a charity golf tournament, could be a company anniversary, it could be a new product launch, uh, could be, you know, new personnel that you’re doing, you know, don’t send me everything because one of the things that happened before, uh, before the roller coaster happened back in 2020, uh, we just used to post, uh, construction stuff but now one of the things that I learned is people want to have more to life, so I post all sorts of stuff on there.

I even… I posted stuff about hair, how to buy the right hair extensions, you know, so half my circulation is female so it’s, uh, the bottom line is I put stuff on there, cell phones, insurance, how to buy the right car, I mean I just put all sorts of stuff that I think that as as a consumer that I’d want to know about other than just, you know, believe me, we’re still dominated by construction facilities, you know, that kind of stuff but the bottom Line is, don’t just send it to me and I actually will come back to you, it might take me a little bit but I we answer all our emails and if we post it we send you the link. It’s good for our SEO for both cars, that search engine optimization for those who don’t know what that is, which is very crucial for Google to find you on the web and, uh, anyway send me stuff, we print it, we got plenty of so you know we’ll post it up on the web, we’ve got plenty of social media you know avenues for you to be on and, uh, you know it’s a win-win and like I said that’s how Brian Gunner he just you know saw a podcast, he went on my inquiry on my email, boom, I don’t know on the newsletter and here he is so you can do the same thing so well before we go if uh if you wanted to leave one positive thought or phrase with our listeners out there Commercial Construction Coffee Talk what would it be? Yeah, there’s one thing I’ve learned about construction and construction people is they are very loyal and some best best people in the world um and I think what I try to tell people I even tell my kids like relationships is everything you don’t know when you run into somebody whether it was 20 years ago 10 years ago 15 years ago when they might come back into your life or have you know you will learn something from them they learn something for you and you build a relationship and you build a friendship and I can go back David and talk about this client or that client and how they’re still using our services and maybe I maybe I met this one guy when he was 25 years old when I was printing and now his kids are working at the construction company and I’m printing for his kids and I ask you know how’s your dad doing and they’re like how do you know my dad.

You know what I mean how do you know my mom right yeah it’s like yeah, known your mom you know before your mom and dad were married you know we were doing work for for you guys and uh and that’s just it’s been the best part is dealing with contractors and designers and building relationships and I think we can go back and and understand that we were Eyes Wide Open we were we were listening and we were humble and we just listened to our customers and we wanted to you know be partners with them however that means you know be a part of their group and I think you know being open to that years ago is has helped us in relationship building and building your own brand is very important hey it’s a very you know believe it or not it’s a very small world out there and uh you never want to burn any bridges and uh I mean obviously look I I you know one of the things I’ve learned about in my digital classes is negativity you don’t have time for it get rid of it they don’t play in your sandbox find people that want to play in your sandbox and listen not everybody’s gonna like me that’s okay with me you know you know it’s it’s it’s the nature of the beast it’s being a human being but relate you know it’s a very small world and uh believe it or not there’s eight billion people on the planet but people halfway across the world they find me and uh and nurturing that stuff and right now a lot of my a lot of my clients I’ve known for the last 25 years as a publisher they’re starting to get they’re starting to retire if they’re a small business hopefully their their siblings are are coming in and taking the business over some of them are you know third fourth like my company my my parents my grandparents and shoot they’ve 1888 do the math you know it’s over 100 and something years old so um uh if if you nurture that stuff even if someone retires and the and the new blood comes in it you can still and who knows you it might even take you to the to the next level if you scale your business you know that’s the big buzzword scale scale scale you know these days but bottom line is it’s more revenue.

How am I going to make more revenue and keep my my company you know growing and uh so in the commercial construction sector it’s the same thing I mean you can look at the top you know like architecture firms or construction firms you know there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of them out there but if you look at the you know the top uh 100 they make up a small percentage of the business and then there’s everybody else so you know and listen, big, small, some people don’t want to do business with the big boys, they want to have more customer service so yeah, keep you know reputation and all that it’s impeccable you know it’s if you have a business out there and you want to continue and you’ve been around there for a long time relationships are the best thing ever you know there’s sometimes you might not I’ve known people to have them give me business forever and then all of a sudden they started after you know 15 20 years and I’m like what did I tell you Nat that that it wasn’t telling you you know 20 years ago you know well I just saw the light the light bulb went off I don’t know but and I tell people I’m like I I tell you all you did a billion dollars last year you should run a little ad in the magazine or like I know you don’t need this ad but it can help you you know because I do have a lot of traffic on the site so you never know where your next sale is going to come in sales are you know you don’t want to turn away any business unless you can’t you know you know basically get the project on so uh very wise wisdom you know and uh you know I’m right there with you with the relationships so um any final thoughts before we uh sign off you know as we are you let me ask you this you know the Doom and Gloom I don’t even watch the news anymore I don’t really I’m done I just I kind of I’m on YouTube I’m I have my sources that I want to get my my stuff from that I know I’m getting the real the real so to speak but uh I’m very positive for the next uh you know for the remainder of uh uh you know this quarter going into the final quarter in Q4 and going into the new year I’m very positive because yeah like I said I don’t have those Doom and Gloom goggles on you know what what are your thoughts as you know we go into the you know the Final Phase in the last quarter of the year and going into the new year coming up man we are so excited our team is so excited to have the embedded app and pro core launching back on May 1st to do over a year and a half of testing and development and uh you know so we’re really didn’t even haven’t launched it yet you know because it’s summertime you know news yes you know people are away so we’re ready to start sending out some information you know after Labor Day when everybody’s back I know the South’s back a little bit earlier than the north but we’re gonna Target you know.

Just after Labor Day to make the announcement the press release about the embedded app so there’s we still have a lot of passion about the business it’s it’s been exciting to watched it transform the way it’s transformed uh for the 30 years I’ve been in it so you know now we have this uh this is exciting product to be working on right now so we’re we’re all fired up we’re really happy and uh every time we have a new user come on board or a new Prime user or a new company using us and you know I’d love to call them and find out how they hear about this you know what I mean you know we’ll we’ll have clients that come on after hearing this uh this podcast and it’ll be exciting because we just love building business and it’s exciting for our team. Hey listen I’m excited so for all you out there who aren’t excited you should be excited okay because it’s an exciting time there’s all you know I am mentally drained every day after you know watching all this stuff and working I’m getting stuff done by the time I’m ready to go catch a couple hours of Z’s and do it all over again the following day you know I’m just it’s it’s an exciting time to be in business you know no matter what what business you’re in commercial construction man it’s exciting new prototypes all sorts of stuff you won’t recognize what buildings look like in the next five years there’s all sorts of stuff that’s going on so I am excited too and I’m looking forward to uh you know checking out the uh the program I saw the pro before we did our thing I was I look at the websites before I get on my podcast I saw the procore gig on your on your website you know on your landing page so uh I’m gonna go check it out and uh Elmo construction guy.

So I’m going to look at it so all right so a couple things for before we sign off sure number one hey we want you to find this podcast so hit the like button okay it’s the YouTube algorithms you got it you got to do it you know so we can you Know people can find Brian, what he has to say, and you know, his new product lines and all that stuff. So hit the like button if you’re out on a construction site. Make sure you stay safe, okay, once you get home at night, so you can do it again the following day. Okay, so being safe is the most important thing to us here, you know, in the sector, and it’s still the dog days of summer. Okay, so we want you to stay hydrated. Hydration, oh dehydration headaches and all that stuff. Please just put some electrolytes in your water bottle or just drink water, but make sure you stay hydrated out there on the site. So with that said, so Brian, pleasure having you on. I look forward to seeing you, like I said, I have my event up in September 28th in New York, 12 to 4, and at Penthouse 45. It’s called, that’s where the event is, awesome. And hopefully, we’ll get to meet you in person and I’ll shake your hands, no fist pumps. And for all you out there, Commercial Construction Coffee Talk land, listen, today’s Thursday, weekend’s coming up. Remember to recharge your battery, take some time off, put your phone away, or you know, don’t pick it up, and you know, enjoy, you know, don’t do work, you know, the things. And you know, all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy from The Shining, way back when, you know, that’s right, that was a white classic, the book, the book scared the heck out of me when I had to read it in prep school. So I’ll be back, so Brian, say goodbye from the Big Apple, New York. Thank you everybody, it’s glad to be on here, thanks David. Hey, pleasure meeting and having you as a guest. And I’m going to sign off from Sugar Hill, about 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, and right below the Beaufort Dam on Lake Lanier. So with that said everybody, enjoy the weekend coming up, and have a great rest of you got a couple weeks left, and it’s gonna be Labor Day weekend, and then we go into the fall, and before you know it, like I said, it’s going to be the holidays and boom 2024 here we come. So everybody, we will see you next time on another episode of Commercial Construction Coffee Talk. Brian, you’re the man, I appreciate it, all right, thanks so much, David. Yvette, ciao.