Latest / The Mobilization Mindset / Episode 144 | Payroll & Back Office Chaos with Brek Goin

Transcript

Episode 144 | Payroll & Back Office Chaos with Brek Goin · The Mobilization Mindset

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: You've indicated several times today that back office is key.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we all anyone that's working and running a construction company knows if your back office isn't tight, the front of the house, the team in the field suffers.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody suffers.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's also kept in the office.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: So oftentimes it's yes, but it's money is made in the field, but it's kept in the office.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what really a lot of contractors need to change their mindset on this is like stop seeing your office as just like this cost center overhead.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like think about them as infrastructure.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like they are designed there to block and tackle and to remove obstacles for the field.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Same payroll system.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to use ADP.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to go find any specific one and make it work for you, especially if you're a government contractor, especially if you have to do certified payrolls or you just have a lot of payroll and it's construction.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is an episode for you to listen to.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on, Scott.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to try to follow that intro to the the best of my ability.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I like it, man.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I like it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tell everybody what I mean, a payroll company is something people know, but there isn't many payroll companies called hammer or anything even close.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: So why is hammer important for people to understand?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: What do you what is hammer?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Scott, we're we're we're just the boring payroll guys that can't spell our company name right.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're missing that E.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was an expensive E.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I I think on the on the top level, Scott, we're we're a unified platform for specialty contractors.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: We like to call ourselves a platform for field of finance.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's everything.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's payroll, HR, field operations.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, in simple sense, anything that happens in the field gets pushed to payroll.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And natively, we've built compliance in it.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So all those fun uh certified reports that all of us uh tend to dread can now be done in a click of a button, and you can make a lot more money doing this work.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we all know anyone that's doing government contracting, you know, if you don't have your certified payrolls correct, or you have an X missing, a dot missing, or a check box somewhere, you put yourself on a 30-day delay from getting paid.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that can be painful.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, how did you get into this business?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me a little bit about your background.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get let's tell people know like why did you decide to be the commercial construction contractor, labor, and payroll company?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was born and raised in this industry, Scott.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, one thing that I will say is like most software people that try to serve construction in the first place have never really stepped foot on a job site.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: They try to study the industry from a distance, then their air conditioned, Ivy League school and everything, and then they try to tell contractors how to run their business.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: That is like the furthest thing from kind of how we got started and everything.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I would say for my background, um, I grew up in this industry.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like my grandfather had his logging company, worked with him on heavy equipment.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was like the cool shit to me ever.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: My my I don't sorry if I I'm not allowed to carry on here, but the the passion comes out.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but my my dad ran a subcontracting drywall company.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so for me, like I had spent most of my entire life around job sites, working recruits.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it was only till like later in my life where I really started to see um a lot of the stress from running a contracting company.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like personally, for my family, especially like as I got older, um my dad's company, the the drywall subcontracting company, a lot of his nights were just paperwork.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: He was running his company out of a briefcase, Scott.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nights, evenings.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of his work was just paper and fax machines.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I witnessed a lot of that just being run off the kitchen table.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think for us, like how we got started into it, like I remember within the family company driving around, delivering paper checks, waiting in safe, safe way parking lots for the guys to pick up their checks, hiding it in equipment.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Scott, there's only so many places that you can hide paper checks and pieces of equipment, especially those hard checks, man.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: ACH and just electronic has not been around forever.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I I really just kind of recalled a lot of my dad just trying to hold the business together.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, for me, like I'd spent even before Hammer, like I'd spent my entire uh life and then even some of my early professional life in the construction space.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing a lot of social media marketing and brand building for product manufacturers like James Hardy, Jill Wynne, a lot of these folks.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was just like very deep in the industry, even before Hammer starting a podcast and doing all that stuff.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I I think what like really kicked it off is you know, I had met so many different contractors in this industry, stayed very, very close to them.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I think like the light bulb moment was kind of like actually similar to your background, Scott, with condo and everything, like you had mentioned on our podcast.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a buddy of mine, he he was a framing subcontractor.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, classic subcontractor, 50-ish employee's wife was holding everything together in the office.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: He called me one day, his name was Jamie, and he's like, Hey, you're like the tech guy.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you should come down and visit the office and like Kim, his wife, she's like, she's stressed out.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, just try to come figure like if you can help us out or anything.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's no expectation of any of this stuff, Scott.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I went down there with my business partner.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: We spent probably three hours with her.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: This was one person managing 50 guys, several projects, classic prevailing wage job hit.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that she had told me, which got me really, really excited, but also had a lot of empathy for some of her pain was uh, you know, she had said, We had won this prevailing wage job.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: My mom comes in every single week with me just to get payroll across the finish line.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And she's stressed out, she's managing all this paper.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the one thing that she had said that is still like in my brain, this was three years ago, three, three and a half years ago.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: She had said, the guy we want this prevailing wage job.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was a jail, and the guys love it because they're getting paid a shit ton of money.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And she goes, I effing hate it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I told Jamie, we're never doing one of these jobs again.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Who's gonna work?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: His wife or the labor force?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so the the the reality that we saw, like we just started looking around.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this wasn't, hey, we're gonna come down there and we're gonna figure out something to build.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was now of hey, do other Kims have this problem?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Is this truly a thing, or is it just, you know, they landed at this job and they're just trying to figure out and get into the motion.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: But we really couldn't find anything compelling.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: They were running off uh QuickBooks, we heard people running off ADP and paychecks.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not many people have had a pleasant experience with them, both on the support side or just it being helpful to a contractor.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean, from there, see uh, like we went out, tried to find more Kims.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: We found that everybody was so close to rage quitting when they were doing payroll and these certified reports and trying to figure out all these fringe benefits.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think at that point, and why I kind of resonate with your story is it became so obvious to us that we shouldn't ignore this.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we're like, hey, we should probably go out and build this.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we wanted to build something that really blended two worlds, both field and finance.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because one thing that I'm personally passionate about is I come from a lot of the field side, I only experienced the back office sizes.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I got a little bit older where I could touch some of the paper.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was always really passionate about like building for Roger.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Roger is this guy that was a drywall hanger in my family's company, the guy that refused to use a drywall lift to actually hang the drywall on a ceiling.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is like put it up one hand, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, we need to build something that can pass the Roger test and then also make the Kims of the world really, really happy.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so we just didn't really find anything that was that compelling.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I've always found that a lot of these contractors in this space are they've just inherited old like 1997 software that's fits the dental office, and then they shoehorn it for a contractor, or they're just running on like five, 10 different things where it's like, you know, your tools are not really helping you grow.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what got really us really, really excited, and how our our story started with Jamie and Kim.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Find a problem, create a solution, and then see how many people are your solution works for.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And if obviously it's good, people are gonna adapt it because what you tackle, the problem you tackled is a big one.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's um, it's a real problem, it takes a lot of effort, and not just for Kim, but even a payroll team.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: It it's a it's a lot.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you're doing regular payrolls and all of a sudden you have a prevailing wage job, or you have certified payrolls, you're starting to do a bonded job and you got to have certified payrolls or Davis Bacon wages.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's a few things.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: One, it's a lot of work, but two, there's a hell of a lot of risk attached to it too.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because you screw one of those things up, you you get you can have some real damages and pain uh legally too.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, having a solution that you can count on to take care of that is is real.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: So let's think about this a second.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So uh there's there's contractors are listening to this right now, they've done certified payrolls, and they're like, okay, yeah, I'm using ADP or I'm using name any other payroll company.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they have a process for doing their certified payrolls and et cetera.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: But what is exactly I want to I I do want a solution, but okay, Hammer sounds great.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm listening to this podcast.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Breck, you seem like a great guy.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: I I I've talked around, I can see that I'm not the first company that's gonna be using you either.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: You've got plenty of customers.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'd go to plug into you.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: What what kind of experience would I expect?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like what is what is gonna happen?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what do I have to deliver to you that's different than what I'm doing all on my own?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, the different there's a variety of differences, Scott.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a variety of maybe you got a back office superhero that is manually doing all their certified payroll ports, working with LCP tracker and manually plugging those things in.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can do that in a click, and your payroll admin can actually take a vacation.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an impact.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think the ultimate impact to I don't want to get into like features and everything because I don't want to bore the audience today, but I think a lot of the impact is everything that touches the field is going to streamline and bolt in directly to the payroll system.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, like for us, like one thing that I will say like we're a payroll company at our core.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not just like a certified payroll company where you're taking all your paychecks or your ADP or other information, plugging it into getting a certified payroll report.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: We do all of that natively.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like everybody that is using our system has a complete field to finance workflow where guys are actually in our system running their entire operations from tracking their time, viewing their PTO, doing their daily reports because all those GCs want their paperwork, um, to the payroll admins, being able to process payroll to generate certifies out of our system and to do it at like a state, local, and federal level, too.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's everything from their WH347 to any labor reporting software they're they're utilizing.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes we come across a lot of contractors that are mandated to use something like an LCP tracker.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: They'll get reports directly out of Hammer and it maps directly into LCB tracker.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: So now, like their old reality was you got all this human intervention at every single stage, massaging all this data.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's natively out of their payroll system.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you've pointed out GCs are also dealing with like massive amounts of paperwork and documentation, you know, every single day.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: But from your perspective, how does having a dialed-in back office, like certified payroll, the reporting systems of it, communication, how does that actually become a competitive advantage for your typical subcontractor trying to manage that relationship and gain new ones?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I would say like for dialed in back office, this is gonna be the difference between winning and losing jobs and winning your jobs that competitors just can't touch.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like Scott, you obviously know this, and I think maybe more people should, but you got the Infrastructure Jobs Act, you got the CHIPS Act, there's trillions of dollars going into this space.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: There are our whole I don't know if you you you had seen this, but I think I'd mentioned it on our podcast too.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: But America's infrastructure grade, they came out with a report card for 2025.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're rated at a D.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: A D.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's a damn problem.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's problem.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's bad too.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then you got all this chips money going to data centers.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: So while all of us are having fun prompting our AI tools and everything, like America's infrastructure requires contractors to get into this space.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's super, super lucrative.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: However, it comes with the cost.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's a shit ton of landmines in this space.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what I would say, like, you know, I think some of the biggest competitive advantages, kind of going back to your question, um, first and foremost, like the biggest one is being able to play the paper game super well.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the paper game is either towards general contractors or public work.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because Scott, you said it perfectly on our podcast.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: You said, I'm paraphrasing here, but you had said something along the lines just because the job is the same amount doesn't mean it has the same rules and requirements.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, it's a lot fucking worse.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so um I would say going back to the paper game and everything, it's a different game.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you're a specialty and you can play the paper game that's required of your GC, your agency, federal, state, local requirements.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: When you make it easier for a general contractor to work with you, you become a hell of a lot easier to work with.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: You start becoming a contractor of choice.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens when you start becoming a contractor of choice?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: You start winning more jobs, and then you start competing on value, not just price.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And all of that equals getting paid faster, and that starts really starting sending like a I would say like a ripple effect through the business.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now you actually have the infrastructure to win more work and retain your people, not just hey, we won this job and now we really got to figure it out.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um like I'll I'll give you an example.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: That this lady named Jodi, she's one of our customers, she's a civil contractor.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is like one of my favorite stories.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: She had emailed me and my co-founder, email subject line was certified payroll, Friday positivity, exclamation point, exclamation point.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, what a hook.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta, I gotta open this.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's two things that she said in the email.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: First and foremost, she was using paychecks, QuickBooks, everything before.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: She was really giving Hammer the benefit of the doubt and was like, all right, I'll try the system.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Her biggest aha moment was she sent it in an email.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: She said, our GC asked for certain six weeks of certified payroll reports that would have taken her up to 70 hours to produce.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: The GC said, I need that by tomorrow in order for us to release payment to you guys.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, it was gonna be the following month for a payment to get released.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: She had done six weeks of certified payroll reporting in the matter of a couple minutes, sent it to the GC.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: The GC actually showed up to their office the next day and gave them the check.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: So she called that out.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: They actually got paid.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing that she had said that I never would have like guessed, but she goes, Because of you guys, I'm able to take my longest vacation and I've been with the company for eight years.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is the same gal that was like, I don't trust any payroll company of doing XYZ, I don't trust anybody doing certified payroll ports.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: You guys just saved me 70 hours, too.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to Disneyland with my husband and my son for eight days, eight days or 10 days.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this was the same gal that was I'm avoiding vacations.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have too much anxiety around leaving the office.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is the gal holding everything together for all of their guys.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if Jody got sick, if Jody wanted to take a day off, it just wasn't possible.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think like that's a pure that's like a pure pure example of a contractor playing the paper game well and they got paid, and then she's in Disneyland, and so that's really cool.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think the other things too are, and we see this oftentimes, like there's just a lot of contractors that there's a whole new category of revenue that needs to be explored for a lot of these contractors.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, like, you know, one controller that I know said it best, he said, we used to avoid prevailing wage and public work jobs.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he's like, I don't want to touch this, too much administrative work, too much bullshit, blah blah blah.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: They got involved with us, and now they say, like, I'm prepared for any federal, any state, any agency, like, bring it.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: The money is there, we're going.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Bring it on.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, that's the difference between like a contractor that doesn't want to touch it to a contractor that's like, there's so much money in this game, like, we're ready to play and we're here to stay.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I think that's a that's a big difference, too.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, solving problems like this too, you know, talking to clients um or potential clients, when they have these kind of issues, it's really difficult for them to scale their business and then grow their business.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I can imagine you probably have some stories where getting these kind of things resolved gives uh businesses the the confidence to continue to bid bigger work or do this kind of work again where they're where there's real opportunity.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like you mentioned, the infrastructure act, the um the the amount of government work that's out there.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: But if you never want to get into it because your experience is certified payrolls is a nightmare, and your your version of Kim in the back office is gonna literally lose her mind if if you have to try to do those payrolls, or God forbid you have to add people on and hire new labor just because you are gonna need certified payroll.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: And now you need to add cost to the back office, but you also need to, you're gonna have like another 20, 30 employees if you win this job and they're all gonna be certified payrolls, and you're like, oh my gosh, I just don't have it.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't grow, or you try to just bid private work.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, do you have some stories of companies that really have like solved this problem?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And either whether it's the right timing or or not, they were just able to really scale.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's like if anybody were to go onto our website and look at our case studies thought, like that's all of what we do.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's there's a variety of situations where you know somebody in the back office, maybe it's the mom acting as the controller or CFO, is actually able to get her life back.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: We save them a thousand hours to do so.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then they lower their payroll cost by 50 grand or administrative work, and so they're already making up the cost of software in a couple months.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then again, to like to your point, I think you said it quickly, like you have a whole new level of confidence getting into this work because what confidence is not is when you have to rely on Kim to hold it all together, and if anything happens to Kim or if she rage quits, that's not confidence, that is somebody holding an entire organization together, and if they leave, you're shit out of luck.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that is not a good spot to be in.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, you don't you don't want uh just one person being the Achilles heel, like you want systems and infrastructure where somebody wants to take a day off.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's confidence where it's like, hey, we can run, and the whole goal of this too is like oftentimes the field and the office are on entirely different cadences where like field is running super fast, back office is just making it up and fixing all the shit.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, if you actually have a proper infrastructure in place, you can start getting stories where you know you're saving hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in back office work.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're able to generate reports, and your GC says, like, God, these guys are really good to work for or work with.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's like, yeah, especially getting them into the formats they have to be in.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's the key.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's not it's only they're certified in the version that you uh think is needed.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: There might be a specific state, there could be specific other issues that can need to be included or excluded.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and formatting needs per job, per government agency, per city, state, county.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's a lot.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: The bonding company's gonna look for certain things sometimes too.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh so being able to have a one system that you can interface with while you're doing your payroll that then can extrapolate that data and put it into the format functionality and uh also be compliant to whoever your customer is and the types of projects and city, state, county, municipalities, that's a real advantage in a business.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh especially if you're doing payroll already.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you have payroll company already, you might as well have that service attached to it.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like sometimes you can get like a federal format of some of these, but like states don't care.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have so many different state forms, like they're all similar data, different formats, so on and so forth.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like we even have some contractors that are working with like an Indian reservation and they need a different format.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like these all kind of like niche different reports that these contractors need out of a system so that they're not having to resort to like Adobe Acrobat to like massage the data and create a format that they can send.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: So all of these to kind of like back to your guys' value profit mobilization funding, all of this like helps unlock some of that cash flow.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like in the case that I mentioned about Jody, I mean, that would have been another month if she didn't have 70 hours of reports.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then that additional month would have been in total 10 weeks of certified reports that now she needs to make up for the next one.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, it doesn't get better.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And just because like you want a public work project or you want a bigger job, no more jobs, no more one bigger job helps alleviate the pain.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: The pain is still going to be there.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's the infrastructure that alleviates it.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So tell me about the journey uh you've had with with hammer since starting it, growing it, scaling the business yourself.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: How did you how did you guys start and how how are you doing now?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, again, a lot of our story um was started based on the the Kim impression.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, what's funny about this, Scott, too, is uh we weren't like, hey, Kim has a problem, let's go solve it for Kim.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our goal was let's go see if there's more Kims out there.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: If there's more Kims out there, let's see if the contractors will pay us before this thing exists.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I come from the contracting space, like getting a contractor to pay for anything is like fighting them sometimes, you know?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's like, if we can get these guys to pay us before this thing exists, that actually means that there's a true, true painful problem to solve.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so before we even started the company, Scott, like we had five or six paying contractors before this thing exists.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like behind me, I still have one of our paper checks framed from our first contractor that wrote us a check.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so like from a general contractor that wrote you a check, you mean?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or no, no, a special specialty contractor.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: So our our prime bread and butter of who we serve.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: They wrote a check.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: This was before we had like a billing system, like set up.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't do all this fancy stuff.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, hey, would you pay us before this thing existed?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then from there, we're like, all right, cool, let's go figure out how to build a payroll system, put our heads down for the next year and a half, two years.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, three, four, five months right after that, we had back-to-back case study, case study, case study, and all of them were tackling prevailing wage.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was one controller was hired, realized that they had a bookkeeping setup that spent 20 hours a week on payroll, now takes them 20 minutes, saved them 50 grand, saved them 900 hours, and that's that same guy that's like, bring it on federal, state, local, like, yeah, we're gonna go.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get a little bit greedy with some of this work right now.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's because they had the infrastructure to do so.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Next one was the Disneyland Jody, where she's like, I'm taking vacations, so it's like certified payroll now equals hanging out by the pool.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so things are going really, real well.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think like we've really started to find our groove in terms of um what the contractors actually need.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, from this, we're growing our team.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're venture backed.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we did go to Silicon Valley to get near the resources and engineers to grow this thing.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and backed by some great general contractors, contractors, Y Combinator.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're trying to pull together all of our resources to make this even more impactful.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think ultimately what we're trying to achieve, Scott, is like the one dream that I have is to be able to say, like, we're helping all these contractors, American infrastructure powered by Hammer.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's what gets me really, really excited.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that is so cool.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also like helping our customers win.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: They we win when they win, and so we're just trying to enable that.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any specific companies like size businesses that should when they that's when they should come to you?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you work with all-size businesses, whether it's revenue or employees or payroll size?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: What's what's right?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what's the common?
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple things like where we really like to reside is a specialty contractor.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: So your MEPs, your concrete guys, those ones uh ranging anywhere between we look a lot around like headcount, but a lot of it is gonna be anywhere between 20, 30 employees up to 3, 350, is where we like to be.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Those types of guys are they're gonna have a little bit different pain points in terms of those spectrum.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I think for the folks that have like the best type of contractor that we would like is they're in public work, they have some experience with it, they are completely bottlenecked by their systems, their processes, or the lack of infrastructure they have.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: They want to do more of it.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's where we win really well and we help a lot of contractors.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Where I don't think that we're the best fit is, and I it's almost like I'm telling it like an anti-pitch here uh against Hammer, but where we're not gonna be a good fit, Scott, is like that contractor that is just starting to bid public work and think software is gonna help everything for them.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like you got to have the right people in the seats, and software is there to automate a lot of the heavy lifting.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what I often say is if you can't reconcile your numbers correctly, you shouldn't be automating them away.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I agree.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think once you automate, if you have a faulty system or process, you need to fix it.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the way to fix it and make it efficient is to do it, use it manually, master it, get it tight, because once you st once you automate that system, which you should do, but you should do it last, to your point.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Once you automate it, you're pouring concrete around it.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't want to have to figure out a new thing you need to do, and uh all of a sudden I want to you know pull this up again, and I we need to tweak this process, not right, and now you gotta chip up all the concrete and then get to the steps and then reconcrete it again.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's just a mess.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows that.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not to use a construction analogy, but I think everybody knows my my intention there.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's to you, I couldn't agree with you more.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I could see now the value you could add is it could for sure be seen when you've done your own set of manual certified payrolls.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to automate those things away because it's still some point you need human intervention.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm not the software guy coming onto this podcast with you, Scott, and saying, like, hey, we're taking away payroll jobs and we're gonna talk about all these buzzwords and AI.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's still gonna be human intervention because you are directly interfacing with, you know, an agency, a contractor, um, rates that were sent to you that's not published anywhere.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: It comes in on the PDF.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so all of those jobs are still going to exist.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: I would say the the pain points are gonna be different across those contractors of that spectrum.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: The the 20 to 30 to 50 contractor, it's you know, they're running on some generic system that's made for a dental office.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're setting up projects as departments within their ADP system that makes no sense the job costing and doesn't unlock the field.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: When you start getting a little bit bigger, it's a couple things.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're running on a disjointed stack that doesn't work, or when they start getting above 50, 100 employees, and they start getting really, really smart about how they want to maximize their fringe benefits.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is when you pay cash fringe, cash fringe is easy, you just pay it on the paycheck, but it's also you're susceptible to all these payroll taxes, so you're inflating your costs.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: So now it's like eating the margin.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when they start to get really smart about this, it's if we're already offering benefits, why are we paying this on the check?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't we route it to like a bona fide trust plan where it's let's start lowering our payroll taxes and let's not put it on the paycheck, and now you're saving your payroll tax, now you're saving two, three, four dollars per hour per worker across your entire workforce.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you become like dangerously competitive and beating your customers on on those margins.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, saving money like that is that's I mean, that's when you can add a step or process and instantly just put money to the bottom line, that's a huge advantage.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: Huge advantage.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like we we uh we have this electrical contractor, there are 160, 170 employees.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: We were asking them about their their fringe benefit setup and everything.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're double paying.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Paying for their benefits, paying it through payroll taxes, paying it on the check.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: They are wasting about 800 grand a year.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just in what?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Payroll taxes, and they're overpaying on their cash.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're already paying for these benefits, they're just paying for them twice.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: So without it routing to a bona fide trust plan, like you're just wasting away money.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes a lot of the is just like the easier process where it's like you don't want to get really smart and creative with your fringe benefit structure where it's like we just need to put everything on the cash or on the check.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just put everything through a spreadsheet.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we don't want to get really creative on how we route these dollars, but it's also like it's an explanation to your field, too, because it's not going to be shown on the pay stub, it's going to be hey, we're putting this towards your retirement.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a conversation to be had there to lower that, but it it's the smarter way to really start taking credit for what you're already paying for.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: I love it, man.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, look, tell me what else we need to know about hammer.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: What about hammer?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's a loaded question, Scott.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I could talk about this all day.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: I get really excited about this.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: I got one thing for you then.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give you a little hint.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: How can people learn more about you, your customers, and the connections in your podcast?
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can go check out Scott's podcast and our Bread to Build podcast.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: That was a really fun episode.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: But you can learn about us through hammer.com.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's no Ian Hammer.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're still struggling on the spelling of that, hammer.com.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: But you can learn about us through the website.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have a bunch of different case studies that talk about that.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I think like that the biggest thing that I want to communicate, Scott, too, is like we really try to balance the field in the office.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes, when you come across these contractors, it's like this sibling rivalry where it's like, hey, management got something really good for the office and the accountants and the payroll team, and you roll it out to the field and they want to throw their iPad and their phone across the worm because it doesn't work for them.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's really the difference that we bring to the table is, and this is not a pitch, it's just the reality of like, don't get tools that free up one team and not the other.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like get people rowing in the same motion so this work becomes easier.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, like one of them is going to become the bottleneck or the Achilles heel.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's so true, man.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: The front office, back office, sales team versus finance, you know, HR versus everybody.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: You you want to avoid those department head swings when you can you can find ways that find commonality that benefit both.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a huge advantage in any business, I think.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so I the the podcast is called the mobilization mindset for a reason.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: So construction has always celebrated the foreman, the crew members, people in the field, the beautiful work that's done, and all rightfully so.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: But as you've indicated several times there, that back office is key.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we all anyone that's working and running a construction company knows if your back office isn't tight, the front of the house, the team in the field suffers.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody suffers.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, what is one mindset shift that you would recommend if to the folks listening today that would really help them walk away with the right knowledge of how they can combine that back office and front office to be on the same team and finding those systems that support both.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you you hear the common phrase, Scott, where it's um money is made in the field, right?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's also kept in the office.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: So oftentimes it's yes, but it's money is made in the field, but it's kept in the office.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what really a lot of contractors need to change their mindset on this, and I've posted about this a few times, but I think it's so true, is like stop seeing your office as just like this cost center overhead.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, think about them as infrastructure, like they are designed there to block and tackle and to remove obstacles for the field.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's what they should be designed for, not this makeup work and they're drowning in all this work and they're working 60, 70 hours a week just fixing shit.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, really start thinking about them as the infrastructure, your like offensive lines, you're your quarterbacks, and everybody can go out there and really start driving and producing the field because oftentimes a lot of these field workers they want to be able to run.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're not out there doing all this data stuff and like making the office lives a little bit easier in their air conditioning offices.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I celebrate both, but it's the reality of this is like you got to get the siblings on the same team.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: You are one team, not two teams.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would say like the mindset that needs to shift is like treat them as infrastructure, not overhead.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't agree with you more.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, the most successful companies I see have a great balance between that exactly front of the house, back of the house.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Both respect each other tremendously, both play a key role, and both ultimately get the final finished product done, and they know exactly how that happens.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Especially not only just the payroll back office or what people think of as overhead, but even your accounting team come talking to your field teams and support teams and superintendents, knowing what's going on there.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Those two teams talking directly, that that's like pouring gas on a fire, man.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: And and the whole back office can celebrate that.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Man, Brack, it's been awesome.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: I know people can find more about you on LinkedIn and also at hammer.com, and that's H-A-M-M-R.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Hammer with no E.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Man, you've been great, dude.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate you sharing so much knowledge and info.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for thanks for.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was almost gonna say thanks, Scott, for coming on because I had you last week, but thanks for having me on this time.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're welcome, man.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to both these episodes coming out and sharing the show.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: So likewise, thank you, Scott.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, everybody, I hope you've learned something new.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: I know you've now found a place to go.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh last time I checked, no one loved their payroll company.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: So let's go give Breck some love.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you can dislike him just as much as you dislike everybody else, but at the same time get the right reports you need and the right functionality, it certainly seems like something worth checking out.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: So until next time, everyone, you can find us at mobilizationfunding.com, our YouTube channel.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be able to see this episode live if you are listening.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we also have lots of great content on our mobilization funding YouTube channel and website.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh take care, everyone.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Have a great week and may God bless you.