In the five years since implementing the Aspire platform, Al has discovered numerous efficiencies that have allowed him to improve operations and accelerate growth.
With the system's mobile capabilities, production managers can now make schedule changes, track hours, and update estimates while on the job. This has cut down on administrative work and, in cases of overtime, helped PMs either improve estimates or increase crew productivity.
The same mobile capabilities have empowered account managers to speed up their sales cycle. For larger jobs, the time it takes to produce a quote has decreased from one to two weeks to one to two days. For smaller jobs, quotes are now completed on site. Collectively, these efficiencies have allowed Aphix to focus less on paperwork and more on growth.
With efficient inputs have come useful outputs. Al and his team use Aspire to run up-to-the-minute reports on sales, production, material management, scheduling, and crew oversight. “Years ago, people had to wait for a monthly close before gaining insights into their company’s performance. Now, you don’t have to wait for a decision to go poorly before you react. Aspire empowers us to make informed decisions in real-time so we can optimize revenue.”
Al gives an example: “We were running 150,000 working hours, which meant there were several thousand unaccounted driving hours. Reports from Aspire helped us realize how those hours were impacting the bottom line, so we could adjust our pricing.”
In another example, Al acted on the platform's reporting to make a bold choice not to renew a $2M client. The gross revenue on that client was solid, but analysis in Aspire revealed that the gross margins were weak due to huge overhead. Al recalls, “We couldn’t have made that decision without the information coming out of the Aspire platform.”
Through these types of analyses, the company can better understand their costs and evaluate their wages in order to build proposal templates where price points align to production points.
