Latest / Contractor Business Builder Podcast / Estimating made EASY with ChatGPT

Transcript

Estimating made EASY with ChatGPT · Contractor Business Builder Podcast

0:00
Ever spent hours on an estimate just to have clients ghost you
0:04
or pick a cheaper bid? I'm about to show you a system
0:07
to get you faster, more accurate numbers without the stress.
0:10
In this video, you'll discover whether whether AI is actually
0:13
good enough to help you estimate, or whether it's just
0:16
hype. Which tech and how much tech
0:18
will you actually need to learn, and which parts of estimating
0:21
become drastically easier? With AI you'll see how you can
0:25
build a scope of work, do takeoffs, and get more accurate
0:29
bids in a fraction by the time. So I can remember years ago
0:33
going to a clients house, either pulling out a set of plans or if
0:36
there's a remodel, we would go through which part of their
0:39
house they want to remodel. I would, you know, take a bunch
0:42
of notes, try not to forget anything, get measurements.
0:45
And then I go home and laboriously try to organize all
0:49
the notes and measurements and everything.
0:50
And you read the plans and formulate some sort of scope of
0:54
work to put into an estimate as well.
0:56
That process right there could take hours and chat should be T
1:00
whichever AI choice can do this in a matter of minutes.
1:04
Now, so how you want to be thinking about this is if you
1:08
are meeting with a client, you can record the conversation.
1:12
If you're not ready to record conversations with clients for
1:16
whatever reason, you can just, you know, keep track of it in
1:20
your notes how you normally would or do just voice memos to
1:23
yourself. But essentially you will put in
1:25
a prompt and you'll say that I've got a raw transcript or
1:29
I've got notes. Please go through this.
1:33
Create a scope of work by trades.
1:35
The more organized you can ask for the information, the better
1:38
job chat TBT is gonna do of giving you that information.
1:43
Quick pro tip here. If you want power prompts for
1:47
the estimating that I'm going to be going through today, check
1:50
out the links in the description and you can download our CHEAT
1:53
SHEET, if you will of prompts specifically for estimating.
1:56
You can plug and play them into chat to BT for all of the
1:59
different points are going to be going over today and we've got
2:02
some great stuff coming up. So you definitely want to stay
2:04
tuned. So I put in one of our power
2:06
prompts that you can get here and it just goes through, you
2:09
know, take these notes, organize them, create a scope of work.
2:12
It's got a bunch of stuff and then I put sort of just a
2:15
hypothetical conversation between a homeowner and a
2:17
contractor or contractor and homeowner here about an
2:20
estimate. So I'm going to let chat TBT do
2:23
its thing and, and run with this.
2:25
So you can see in a matter of seconds here that it's going to
2:29
give you a whole bunch of great information to organize
2:31
everything. If you have measurements, it'll
2:34
put measurements in there. We've got things in our prompts
2:37
that you got to be concerned about with tragic BT and stuff
2:39
like that. That's not hallucinating.
2:41
It's not making stuff up. It's Schmidt will try to help
2:45
you and impress you and, and give you whatever you want.
2:48
But sometimes that means that it won't actually be necessarily
2:52
reading documents or, or going, you know, word for word.
2:55
So we've accounted for that inner prompt that that you get
2:59
here to make sure that it's if there is discrepancies or it's
3:03
unclear about anything that's asking you that and not just
3:05
creating a bunch of stuff, right?
3:06
So that's probably one of your concerns with like estimating
3:09
with AI is like, what if something's missed?
3:11
What if it doesn't understand something?
3:12
We've just makes up a bunch of stuff, right?
3:14
These systems are getting better every single day.
3:16
So from here you can see, you know, countertops, appliances,
3:19
plumbing, electrical, kind of has a good flow of how you
3:22
complete a project, assumptions, exclusions, you know what's
3:26
missing. So it's like, you know, we don't
3:27
know anything about the colours or hardware selection or
3:30
whatever, any discrepancies. So you can now take this
3:33
information, put it into like an estimating program or copy and
3:37
paste or, or, you know, send maybe these additional questions
3:40
to the client if it's like, oh, I forgot to ask you these things
3:43
or whatever. So tons of great stuff here that
3:46
you can create scopes of works and do an analysis in in a
3:50
matter of seconds. All right, so Next up of ways
3:55
you can create faster, more accurate bids with AI is AI is
3:59
now moving more from like a text based sort of system, like I
4:03
mentioned into it can read documents, it can read drawings,
4:07
it can get specifications and and tons of stuff straight from
4:10
the plans. Even chat should be you can do
4:12
that. And I'm going to be showing you
4:13
how to use it in that way, you know, in some of the next steps.
4:17
But for here you can actually get takeoffs and estimating
4:21
software is coming into using this more and more.
4:23
In this case, I'm using build exact.
4:25
They've got this thing called takeoff assistant called blue.
4:29
I'm sure other takeoff softwares are, you know, close to this as
4:31
well. But it's really quite amazing
4:33
what can happen here. So I've got this sample set of
4:36
plans. It's got some floor plans here
4:39
and I'm just going to click, you know, get some floor areas and
4:43
it's just going to run with it and it's going to get you take
4:46
offs for floor areas. You don't have to, you know,
4:48
like digital takeoffs were already amazing thing when I
4:51
started using them. I was like, wow, there's just,
4:53
it helps so much once you get the hang of it, you just, you
4:55
know, click and you can do digital takeoffs and it still
4:58
won't do everything, not yet anyways from what I've seen.
5:02
But you can see here within maybe 30 seconds or whatever
5:05
that was, we've already got room by room takeoffs.
5:09
We've got full, you know, square footages.
5:11
You can now import this into your estimate and it's super
5:14
fast, super easy. Play around with it a little
5:17
bit. A lot of this stuff with AI,
5:18
it's like, can it do this already?
5:20
Is it good enough? Test it.
5:22
If it doesn't work, try it in a month or two because it's
5:24
probably good enough by then. Like I was trying this, I don't
5:27
know, a couple months back with some other softwares to do AI
5:32
takeoffs and it was kind of not all there, but it's really
5:35
improved a ton just in the last couple of months, right?
5:39
So now you seeing the actual takeoff software do takeoffs.
5:42
Now let's see how ChatGPT handles this.
5:44
And you know, I've been testing this out for a while.
5:46
It's pretty amazing stuff. So I put in here just a sample
5:50
House plan that I, that I got and put in one of our power
5:54
prompts here you receive architectural drawing sketches,
5:57
specifications, so on and so forth.
6:00
And we've formulated these prompts specifically for Chachi
6:03
BT and make sure that everything's getting calculated
6:06
properly. It's flagging missing
6:08
information and it's exporting it in in the way that we want.
6:12
So I all done is, is upload the PDF I put in the prompt and I'll
6:16
let it do its thing. Considering it is a PDF
6:19
document. It may take a little longer, but
6:21
it actually is just cruising through this.
6:23
So it'll actually give you material takeoffs again, when
6:28
you get started with this, I would test it the first time.
6:31
So do your own takeoffs like in the takeoff software like I just
6:34
showed you and then throw it in chat you BT with the plans and
6:37
see how close it is. See if it's it's made its mark
6:40
and if there are discrepancies, ask it.
6:43
Hey, I did this take off myself. It showed that we had, you know,
6:47
1300 square feet and you're saying it's 1184.
6:51
Why is there this discrepancy right and see if it makes sense
6:55
again. And you can kind of figure out
6:57
what's, you know, what it can do, what it can't do and and why
7:00
the difference. But what I found in my
7:02
experience is it's it's a surprisingly accurate and very
7:06
well done. Another thing is to that when
7:09
you are doing like something specific to your area to mention
7:13
where you're located, it's very important because every you
7:16
know, different people across the country or countries will
7:20
build differently and have, you know, different regulations and
7:24
all that kind of stuff. So, but anyways, you can see
7:26
here concrete framing. It's done takeoffs for US
7:29
roofing. Even I would probably ask it
7:32
some clarifying questions just to make sure it's actually like,
7:35
Hey, did you know what what slope of roof is is on the plans
7:39
or something like that? Just to make sure that it's not
7:41
doing some stupid mistakes that, you know, it's kind of like a
7:44
rookie, rookie material here. But as you can see, pretty
7:47
amazing that from PDF set of plans, it can it can give you
7:51
kind of information from it very accurately.
7:54
So let's say we don't want to do a full, you know, take off.
7:57
We just wanted to analyze these plans.
7:59
Maybe it got sent to us an e-mail.
8:00
Hey, you know, we're looking to build this house.
8:02
Can you, you know, do this for us or whatever.
8:04
And you're like, I don't want to go sit through a bunch of plans,
8:07
throw them in chat should be T and like, summarize the scope of
8:11
work, tell me any key data, so on and so forth.
8:14
You can have a, a prop like this.
8:17
And again, in a matter of seconds, it'll do the review and
8:19
analysis and give you kind of the pertinent data and
8:23
information so that you can then make a quick decision as far as
8:26
you know, what should I be looking at?
8:29
And is this going to be, you know, a fit for us?
8:31
So you can see this took a long time for change BT to go
8:35
three-year full minute and a half just to analyze this.
8:38
So it will happen again. They're always getting faster,
8:41
but depending on the level of analysis and which Chad should
8:44
be T model, it's routing to it can take a little while, but
8:48
again, much faster than yourself going through it.
8:50
So checklist, it'll tell you, you know, key to add a different
8:54
things project scope. So it's two-story, single family
8:57
home, you know, square footages, different types of assemblies
9:01
called out and it'll give you a lot of good information right
9:05
off the bat without having you to go digging through a bunch of
9:08
specifications or plans or, or different things like that.
9:11
So super quick, very helpful. The more you use this, the
9:14
easier it'll get and the faster it will be and the more time
9:17
it'll save you. So you can see at the end here
9:20
too, it's, it's got clarifying questions.
9:21
So jurisdiction code path, you know, where is this site sex
9:26
setbacks, structural, a bunch of different things.
9:29
It's going to ask you. Of course, you don't need to
9:31
know all of this problem, especially if you're just like a
9:33
rough budgeting or, you know, trying to give them a ballpark
9:36
budget. But it, it's good at finding
9:39
those things that are missing on plans.
9:40
Because as you know, one of the biggest frustration is you're
9:44
building something and it's like, why are these plans not
9:47
lining up? Or why did you know the
9:49
architect kind of like this? This doesn't make any sense.
9:52
Now you gotta change order or plan revision and all this kind
9:55
of stuff. Whereas you know, cheap T and
9:57
something like that can do a review of it and, and sometimes
10:00
identify might not identify the specific thing that you know,
10:04
gets wrong, but at least it'll pinpoint, Hey, maybe this is
10:07
something that you should look at or it'll bring up ideas for
10:09
you to have a better idea of like what could be missing or
10:13
could be a significant issue later on when you go to build
10:16
the project. So we, we, as you can see, we
10:20
can pretty much do any part of the estimating using charging BT
10:23
it's just a matter of getting the right information in and
10:26
using the right prompts to, to bring it out.
10:28
The, the next thing that we're going to be looking at here is
10:32
pricing. Pricing is probably one of the
10:34
most time consuming, tedious parts of estimating and it
10:39
actually is getting easier and easier every day.
10:42
If you're using project management software, you've
10:44
probably got price lists in there that are live with, you
10:47
know, Home Depot or build 1 or or whatever.
10:51
But Chafee can actually do this as well.
10:54
Now you know, I'm going to put this in here just to show you
10:58
and we'll see how that does. But now with Chaji agents, you
11:02
can actually create a chat TBT agent that will go to your local
11:09
Home Depot or Rona and look on their website and find the price
11:14
for specific material lists. So if you got a material list or
11:18
certain things that you need priced out, you can actually
11:22
have an agent go and check websites and look for pricing.
11:26
So in this case, it didn't give us specific numbers because it's
11:29
asking for all these clarifying questions, which is actually
11:32
what you want. You do not want charge D just to
11:35
make assumptions of like where you are or especially like this
11:38
is like numbers for estimating and and it needs to be accurate,
11:42
right? So this is what a good prompt
11:44
will do will tell you like, I can't find this information or
11:47
here's here's information that will help you.
11:50
But these are the limitations, right?
11:52
So in this case, it's not going to have the specific pricing,
11:56
but if I were to upload my pricing database or tell it the
12:00
location I'm in, it will give me a quick and fairly accurate
12:06
pricing structure as well. Again, you, you probably want to
12:09
be a little bit more specific, like use this like let's say
12:13
you're estimating the framing, right?
12:14
So you're going to have like a framing list of materials.
12:17
You can put that in and, and give it like some sort of
12:19
database to, to bring this all together.
12:22
I'm doing this like in bulk. So it's, it's going to be more
12:26
kind of loose pricing, but it does work.
12:29
And I've used it like I mentioned before with CHD agents
12:32
to find specific pricing from specific suppliers just using
12:36
websites and things like that. And later on this video, I'm
12:38
going to be showing you how to get really great ballpark
12:41
budgets as well as a number of other things to do with your
12:44
estimate. And just the every one of these
12:47
is going to add up to minutes or hours saved on bids and just
12:51
give you so much more time back. Or even better yet, give you a
12:55
repeatable system and structure that you can provide to one of
12:59
your project managers or part time estimator to be able to do
13:03
a lot of this kind of background and bulk sort of estimating work
13:07
where you then you would just review it afterwards.
13:10
So I know for me, when I was estimating that often, I mean,
13:14
there's a number of different things, one of them being the
13:15
floor assembly, because you might have, you know, TI
13:17
engineered Joyce, it could be two by 10/2 by 12.
13:21
So the, the pricing slightly changes, even though the
13:23
structure is very kind of similar.
13:25
And I always have to go and you got to check these different
13:28
things. And sometimes different parts of
13:30
the different floors will have different types of joists or
13:33
whatever. So again, a simple, pretty
13:37
straightforward prompt here and we're going to ask for the floor
13:40
assembly and we'll see what happens.
13:42
All right, so we can see here we've got 2 by 1016 on centre
13:46
glue and nail four team sold over to about 10 framing prior
13:49
to the roof framing. So we could you know it's got
13:54
quite the the assembly here and you can put in a prompt like
13:57
please condense this into line items that I can throw into an
14:00
estimate or even export this as a spreadsheet that I can upload
14:04
into whichever project management software you have and
14:07
it will be able to create CSV or excel filed.
14:11
What you know, pretty much whatever you want as far as like
14:14
a spreadsheet type file that you can then upload as an estimate
14:19
that you can plug into, you know in this case the flooring
14:21
system, but really any you can use this for for any of them.
14:26
So if you would like the power prompts that I'm putting in here
14:29
for all these different parts of an estimate, check out the links
14:31
in the description below. Like I mentioned, you can get
14:33
our working document. It's an estimating guide for CHB
14:36
T. It'll have all these prompts in
14:38
there. So definitely want to pick it up
14:40
save you a ton of time and money and headaches.
14:43
The next one we're talking about.
14:44
So now we pretty much used it for everything to get the the
14:48
estimate in place and the numbers and and all that, you
14:51
know take off some different things.
14:52
Now there's all this other stuff that comes with estimating which
14:55
you get to and then also like a kind of quick move to be able to
14:59
estimate a full project in a very short period of time to
15:03
give a client a quick way to figure out is this feasible?
15:07
Do I want to spend an hour or two estimating this project or
15:10
do I need to move on to greener pastures?
15:12
Alright, so this one here is this prompt that we're doing in
15:16
this example is for bid packages.
15:19
So now you've got to bid the project.
15:21
Alright, so what's electrical? What's plumbing gonna send over
15:24
to you to your sub trades? In this case, we're going to do
15:26
electrical bid package and this will clarify you in this
15:32
situation, I'm just I just used the plans, but you would take
15:35
your actual estimate and download that as a PDF or
15:39
spreadsheet. Spreadsheet is probably going to
15:41
work the best. Load that into Chachi BT and
15:44
then ask it, can you create a bid package from here?
15:48
Some project management software is, you know, are really easy to
15:51
take line items and move it over.
15:53
But even with that, moving those line items over, you can still
15:57
ask it to kind of summarize and do a nice summary here to give
16:01
it to your subtrade, whoever may be, just so that everyone's
16:05
working from the same point. And like there's a lot more
16:09
information and detail that goes into it.
16:11
So you can see here for electrical, it's clarified scope
16:15
of work, standards, inclusion, exclusions, you know, all these
16:19
different things. You may not use all this.
16:21
And again, you can kind of formulate these prompts to
16:24
either like dial down or expand the level of detail.
16:27
It's just a matter of the prompt and, and how and telling each
16:30
IGBT specifically how you want the information to, to look
16:35
afterwards. And then this is always
16:37
important stuff. It's asking you for your
16:39
clarifications project. I was estimating at the time and
16:44
we so estimated it. We were working with the client.
16:47
We're getting to the drywall stage, not quite, but so I have
16:51
my drywaller come by and provide me a quote.
16:54
Typically he, I know his square footage pricing, so I didn't
16:58
need to get a bit out ahead of time, but I still get him to
17:02
say, let him get a quote from, you know, we're doing rough
17:05
ends. And his goal was, you know,
17:08
number of thousands of dollars over what I had budgeted for.
17:11
And I was like, oh crap, you know what's going on here?
17:14
Did you guys raise your pricing? And he's like, no, this is our,
17:16
our standard pricing. And then I, I just wanna go back
17:20
to my, my takeoffs that I had done.
17:22
And I realized, you know, I'm like 1000 square feet short of
17:26
of theirs, something like that. And I realized later that I had
17:31
missed the ceilings. Now I'm quite sure that if I was
17:36
to put the plans and that original estimate, I, you know,
17:39
I should actually try this. But in should be T and said, is
17:41
there any discrepancies here that it could probably find some
17:45
discrepancies and risks. So that's another great use of
17:50
of something like GPT is it can take a full set of plans or
17:53
estimate, give it all the information, the notes that it
17:56
has and say, what are the risks? Is there anything I'm missing
17:59
here? And do you consider this
18:01
complete? So that's what we're going to do
18:03
here because risks, even though it may not change your numbers,
18:07
it's good to identify those things for yourself, but also
18:10
for the for the client. So so in this case, I don't have
18:14
like a full estimate to to put in here, but it will identify a
18:17
number of things in the plans like this case.
18:21
I was asking for risks or discrepancies in the estimate
18:24
and what you can do as well as you can create like a custom GPT
18:27
so that you don't have to put the prompt in every time.
18:29
It'll actually be like a a loaded sort of program, if you
18:33
will, so that you just have to put an estimate in and it'll run
18:36
a set of instructions on it. So you could like analyze this
18:39
estimate based off of you know, discrepancies with historicals
18:43
or other things. So if you've got give me
18:45
building homes for 5-10 years, you can load in a ton of, you
18:50
know, old estimates and different things throughout the
18:52
years. And then when you put in a new
18:54
estimate, it'll, it'll figure out based off of historical, you
18:59
know, estimates to like. And if you especially you have
19:01
actual numbers now we can get a clear picture of like, hey,
19:05
maybe you want to bump up the pricing on this or hey, you, you
19:08
missed, you know, marking up this, this thing compared to
19:12
previous, you know, years where you've done it differently or
19:14
what have you. So great use of of CHD to to
19:18
figure out risks save you a ton of money and potentially a lot
19:22
of headaches down the road right now.
19:24
Something really cool it is how to build a quick kind of budget
19:31
for a client without having to dive into and do a whole bunch
19:35
of work for them. So you may have this come up
19:37
where lead comes in. They sent you a set of plans.
19:40
Hey, we're thinking about building this new home.
19:42
How much is it going to cost us? Right.
19:44
So they're just looking to kind of get a quick budget and you
19:48
don't want to have to go through a plan and provide a quote and
19:50
everything if you know it's going to cost, you know, 800,000
19:55
and they're expecting, you know, 600,000 or what have you.
19:58
So quickly load up the, the set of plans, put in the power
20:02
prompt. As I mentioned, check out the
20:03
description below to, to get these prompts with all these use
20:06
cases as well. We've got 22 separate guides,
20:10
but one specifically for estimating which you can get
20:12
which has all these prompts in it.
20:14
So here we have some preliminary pricing that we can offer to the
20:17
clients. Of course you will want to load
20:21
whatever kind of square footage pricing.
20:23
If you know you're in, you know a certain square footage pricing
20:26
for a new home build or what have, you can apply those
20:28
metrics here and kind of cross reference or, or give it to
20:32
Chachi PT to figure it out. But it's going to lay out pretty
20:35
much what's, you know, a low, mid, high range.
20:38
And this is an easy way to get some fairly accurate numbers
20:41
over to a client and figure out is this budget in in in the
20:44
right ballpark? We need to maybe change the
20:47
scope or the plans to fit the clients budget or just we ask
20:51
them the client that, you know, this just isn't feasible
20:54
wherever things are at. And then of course it's going to
20:57
bring down, you know, a bunch of assumptions, exclusions and
21:00
risks. So now you can estimate like a
21:02
pro using catch BT Make sure to check out this next video if you
21:07
are looking to set up a complete estimating system from top to
21:11
bottom that you can then delegate to someone else so you
21:13
don't have to do estimating anymore.
21:15
You need that high level system to be able to delegate to do
21:18
more accurate and more profitable bids.
21:20
Go check out this next video, I'll see you there.