Future-Proofing Your Workforce: Attracting Top Talent Without Disrupting Your Operations

Welcome everyone. This is Aaron from Agency of America. I'll be helping with facilitating today's webinar, And I will be handing it to Aaron and Melissa here. Yes, Aaron. Thank you very much. Surprisingly, my name is also Aaron. Aaron Alshouse. I'm the senior technical product manager at HCSS focusing on heavy bid, which if you are unfamiliar with HCSS, heavy bid is our estimating solution. I've been with HCSS now for thirteen years, and I've been involved with heavy bid in one capacity or another for almost the entirety of those thirteen years. Melissa, you want to take it away? Absolutely. Hello. Thanks for being here today. My name is Melissa Sporney. I'm the CFO at Hua Enterprises. We are a Colorado based heavy civil construction and reclamation contractor focused on the energy industry industry. I'm excited to talk with you today about something I'm really passionate about, and that's attracting young people and top talent into the construction industry. All right. Well, as Melissa alluded to, we want to talk about how we're going to bridge the talent gap. How are we going to essentially get those new university graduates to want to come work for us? How are we going to do that? We're going to prioritize the user experience. How are we going to do that? We're going to talk about that Part of doing that is using technology. So if you're one of those construction companies that's still doing things with a pen and paper, might be time to start modernizing. We'll talk about that today as well. And then talking about how we can modernize the company culture and and how all of that plays plays a role in attracting that young talent. I saw a question come in getting a bunch of echo. Is anyone else hearing the echo? Go ahead and put it in the chat or go ahead and put it in the Q and A if you're hearing any echo. Okay. Doesn't look like we're hearing that on any other aspect. Erin, if you wouldn't mind, if you could chat with her or chat with whoever it was that asked that question and see if we can get them squared away here. Friendly little bit of housekeeping. As Aaron mentioned earlier, if you have questions, don't hesitate to post them in the Q and A. We have the Q and A panel loaded up on our end so that we can see questions as they come in. If it's relevant to the slide we're on, we'll answer it there. Otherwise, we have a Q and A slide towards the end of the presentation, and we'll address it there. So, with that being said, first thing we want to address is the industry shift. Now it's no secret, the industry as a whole, the entire construction industry is an aging workforce. What do we mean by that is, well, the average age of the construction industry right now, I believe is hovering around forty five years, with a vast majority of those users looking to retire in the next three to ten years. So now is the perfect opportunity to start thinking about what are we going to do when they retire? What trade secrets do they have when they retire? We want to make sure that we don't just lose their knowledge that they have accumulated over the last several decades. We want to make sure that that information is transferred to the new crop of employees. We also want to take into account the differences between that current generation of workforce and the new generation. It's a nice way to put this training. This kind of lived under a rock. The current generation workforce and the Gen Z workforce coming out of college, they're a little bit different. Gen Z was raised on technology. We want to make sure that we adapt to that technology and make sure that the workforce or the workplace that they are coming into is a welcoming and inviting place that caters to their strengths. Melissa, do you have anything you want to? Well said, Aaron. I think I'll just add, you know, I think the people, those of us who have spent our careers in construction, we know how rewarding this industry can be. And I think that the challenge to us is to attract new people. There are great careers in construction, but we have to understand what the new young top talent is looking for in a career. Longevity, technology, you know, importance, all of those things. So I think it's it's really understand to important to understand this generation of workers. Okay, I'm not seeing any questions come up. So let's go ahead. Let's jump right to the next slide. And that is From Hire to Contribution, the gap. What do we mean by that? Well, in a traditional onboarding scenario, there are what's the way of putting it? There are some processes that typically take place. In the estimating space, the way it typically works is you're going to grab a senior estimator, and they're going to essentially put that new estimator under their wing and they're going to try their best to teach them their trade secrets if they are someone that is very open to the idea. Sometimes, you'll get that that one person that just that's not what they signed up for. They're not there to babysit. They don't want to do it. But it's something that has to be done. All in that time of training that new person, process has slowed down, You're getting slower to bid estimates out. The new estimator doesn't always understand what the seasoned estimator is trying to explain to them. And there's a language barrier, not necessarily just English to English, but just old school versus new school. We need to be able to handle that learning curve and we need to be able to make it so that you do not lose your productivity because your productivity is still your livelihood. Yeah, Erin, I'm going to add to that a little bit. You know, I think from a company, a contractor standpoint, you know, our senior estimators, our chief estimators, their time is so valuable. So really speeding up or controlling the amount of time that it takes for them to train new hires is really important to us because we need them to continue producing estimates and keep the business going. And I would say not very many people love training, right? It's like you have to do your job plus a second job at the same time. So it's critical to be able to lessen the gap between onboarding and when a new hire can really hit the ground running. And I think a system is really, really key to that transition. Very well said. Which kind of leads us into our first poll question of the day. And this really leads into what are you using to estimate? And this is kind of get a feel for the room. Ranging from pen and paper, are you going to, what is it, Office Depot or going to Amazon and buying that estimating sheet? I wish I had a picture of it. I should have put a picture of that in the poll. Or are you using Excel? Or are you using some purpose built estimating solution? Hopefully, if it's purpose built, it's heavy bid, but we'll talk about that. Or something else entirely, which I would be curious about. Exactly, or something else completely, completely, outside of the norm. Okay, I'm not seeing any any new answers. Let's go ahead. Let's share the results. And in those results, Excel is the overwhelming, well, not overwhelming, Excel is the majority, followed closely by a purpose built estimating solution. What does that lead us into? It leads us into a question. And that is, do we continually retrain on the same processes? Or do we find ways to accelerate that onboarding process? So Excel was the vast majority of users. What I have seen in my day to day with Excel estimating solutions is they're all custom built tailored to your particular workflow. They all have macros. They all have some hidden formula somewhere buried on a sheet somewhere off in the distance that you don't necessarily want somebody somebody running into. And it was all built by one or two estimators at the company five, six, ten, twenty years ago. And the key is that estimator is probably looking to retire in the next three to five years. What do we do at that point? Are we going to train the next batch to continually manage the Excel sheet? And if something goes wrong, are we going to call up that estimator as they're sitting in their retirement chair, hopefully on a beach somewhere, and ask them to help us out? Or do we consider looking at one of the purpose built estimating solutions that have a full team, full development team, full support team, looking to help you out in any conceivable way that they can. You know, Erin, this gives me this gives me flashbacks. I personally, in my history in the construction industry, gone through this evolution from pen and paper to Excel to a purpose built estimating system. And I think back how great I thought Excel was when we were moving from pen and paper. But now I see how difficult it was to maintain and update those hidden formulas or price sheets or productivity rates, the version conflicts, all of those things that I think it's a leap of faith to go to a new system, but you eliminate so much risk in those those very Excel programs or worksheets. I don't miss those days, so. Absolutely. Yeah, there there are hidden costs with any with any estimating solution. But one of the costs with with Excel is just having to maintain it yourself. And if something goes wrong, it's solely on you to figure it out and get it fixed. With that, that kind of leads us into our next poll question. And that is, when you are onboarding someone, how long does it typically take you to get that new, new person onboarded and have them have them be a fully productive member of the team. Hi, everyone. I'm having some technical technical issues. It won't let me launch another poll. So if you could type ABCD in the chat, that would be great. Apologies. Zoom is telling me that there's an invalid poll question right now. Okay. I see a couple couple responses in the in the less than a month in the one to three months, but the the majority of users do appear to be in that three to six months or that more than six months camp. So what does that actually mean? That means that I might have an estimator sitting there with them for three to six months or longer. That means I have lost productivity for those three to six months or longer. I don't know how much revenue I have lost because I have not been able to get my estimates out. I've not been able to get my takeoffs done. I don't know if my takeoffs are still as completely accurate as they used to be because now they're kind of half distracted training somebody else. And in essence, that really leads us into our Melissa, I heard you had something you wanted to add on that one. Yeah, I, you know, I just look at this from a financial aspect also, you know, for the people who are debating maybe taking the leap to an advanced program to or from something else, you know, I think that an investment is could probably be outweighed by the soft cost that you're experiencing in these delays to get people, young estimators fully productive. I can say I just recently pulled some of our new estimators. We've recently hired two new junior estimators, and their comment was they could learn the system, our bid system, within a week or two and felt like within a month. So we would be a category A, which I was very pleased to hear. And, you know, it gets down to where they knew all the buttons to push. They knew what to do. It was more about learning our scope of work, which I think for me, I was happy to hear that because that's more valuable to me, that they're learning what kind of work we do, how we do it, what kind of equipment we use, what productivity rates we're expecting, and all of that stuff is held within our system. Just kind of curious and maybe people can throw in the chat if they think that might be worth the investment, just the downtime of their senior people. Yeah, Bill actually made an excellent point. Oftentimes, you're teaching operations as well as estimating. A green estimator might take two years to gain confidence in the field as well well from the senior estimation. Not only are you losing productivity from your estimators, you're also losing productivity from your field personnel because they're having to manage them as well. What kind of impact does that make to your your finances? How do you know what kind of impact that has made? That really opens the door into our next question. And that is, when do you know if you've made money from your work? Aaron, I don't know if the polls are back up, but if not, let's let's go ahead and just make a response in the webinar chat again. Do we know after day one? Do we know after day thirty? Do we know at month end closeout? Do we know at the end of a job? Or do we know basically at the end of the year when we tally everything up we have more dollars in our bank account than we than we spent. So I was able to launch this one here, but I don't think it's being displayed, so feel free to type your answer in the chat. Apologies for the glitch. Yeah, I'm seeing a couple of answers come in. We'll give it just another minute here. Okay. So I see a lot of a lot of answers at the at the end of a job. Sometimes, ideally, weekly, usually monthly. So, after a month, month end close out or at the end of a job. In the in the world, that's usually a lot that's too late usually to make an adjustment. It is what it is at that point. Whether you've made money or not, there's not much you can do to change it. Moving to a more purpose built solution allows you to get those numbers drastically faster. In most cases, if you're filling out your information correctly, you can have it at the end of the day. At the end of the workday, you can tell whether you have made money on the job that day or you have lost money. It allows you to see the productivity hit that those new onboard people have made to your company and you can make adjustments based on that information much sooner than if you were to wait till the end of the job because at that point you're off to the next one. I think this is definitely something we've seen in the last five years where we've really focused on seeing an improvement. You know, we started really estimating jobs formally only like seven to ten years ago in the company's twenty plus year history And going from end of the year to now, there's so many people at every level invested on a daily basis on whether that project is making money. It's not just me as the CFO or the controller or the project manager. Our foreman can start doing that also. And I think also, you you might not show dollars and cents to everybody at every level, which we certainly don't, but they can track as far as their labor hours, equipment hours, which ultimately relates to dollars. And so I, again, I would challenge the group and see what, you know, what is an investment worth in something in advancing your estimating programs, making this attractive to young people, and also getting the visibility and that instant feedback loop to your entire team on how your project is doing. Melissa and I have spent the last, was it twenty minutes or so talking about why it is important to adopt technology. But there's another facet to it. And that is we want to adopt technology because that is what the new generation workforce is being trained on. So from the university setting, they are not using pen and paper. They are not going through. They do not have the estimating sheets in the classroom. They are not doing their takeoffs on those giant sheets of PDFs with the, you know, fifty, sixty pages. It's all digital. They're using digital takeoff solutions. They're using digital estimating solutions. And that's what they're learning on. Where we want to spend time onboarding, as Melissa pointed out earlier, we want to teach them our scopes of work. We don't want to teach them how to estimate. That's something that they should learn how to do in the classroom. They know they might need to learn, you know, whether or not for our company, we use a D6 or a D8 dozer or something to that nature. But we're not trying to teach them how in the estimating solution to make that change. That should be done right out of college. They should be able to hit the ground running that aspect. That alone can drastically reduce the onboarding time for a new employee. And I think that's just the expectation, especially of recent graduates, You know, it may be a little lesser if you have someone coming up, like, through the trade. But for recent graduates, I I just think that that's the expectation, you know, going to a, a place of business to have tools that you can use to more effectively do your job. And I think this is one of the areas that we can really help those people integrate into the workforce and meet their expectations for their career. Yes, absolutely. And one of the places that HCSS is really trying to put our foot, best foot forward is in that university space. Currently, HCSS, especially heavy bid, is in over fifty universities currently. We work directly with those universities. Those universities have a full program catered to cost estimating, whether it's takeoffs or just the estimating process. HCSS has purpose built curriculum if the college wants it, or in a lot of cases, they have their own curriculum that they have integrated heavy bid heavy bid with in order to make use of it and teach them using real world solutions. Heavy bid for the university is not a watered down version. They get the fullest extent of what HCSS offers. And that has really helped out in the university space when especially in the competition space, whether that is the Ohio Contractors Association or the National Design Build Institute of America, they use HeavyBid in their competition settings. And those students are bidding their projects and winning those competitions using heavy bid. So heavy bid is getting ingrained at every level of the university space. Erin, I have to admit, I didn't know this about HTSS before we started preparing for this webinar, but I think this is an amazing, amazing partnership and really just shows an investment into the construction industry in general and the topic that I think is impactful to so many of us as contractors, because it's hard to find and retain people in this industry, especially the professionals who want to sit behind a desk and be estimators, be project managers. And so awesome. I'm gonna say kudos to you guys. I think this is an amazing program. I wish I would have known about it a couple months ago when we were hiring. It is definitely an awesome program, and I I'm excited to work with it. With that, you know, we're we're working with, like I said, we're working directly with the universities in some cases like Texas A and M. We're working directly with the university professors to make sure that HeavyBid is situated and ready for their classes in the fall. Now With all you contractors out there, since this was new information to me, I also asked Aaron and his team, I think we have some contact information in case you have a contact at a local university or college that you might want to propose this to. I think there's some contact information at the end of the webinar. Is that correct, Aaron? There there should be. If not, I'll post it up. Okay, perfect. But with that, that really leads into why are we making such an investment into the university space? And that is really the generation of college student nowadays. They were raised on technology. What's the old adage? The iPad kid generation or something to that nature. They have learned in every facet of their life on technology. I see it in my kids' schools. They've got a hundred inch touchscreen in every one of their classrooms. It drives me nuts sometimes to see it, but that's the world that they are growing up with and they are getting used to. They do not want to take a step back and use pen and paper. They do not want to take a step back and not use a purpose built solution. So getting HeavyBid into the classroom teaches them real world tools that they can then take and use in a real world application with a construction company of their choice. Keyword being their choice. They are going to look for companies that are using the tools that they learned at the university, whatever college that they are graduating from. They do not want to have to learn another program or do what they feel in their mind as they step back in technology. Yeah, we just had an incident. I've told you about the two new estimators we've hired. And one of the young estimators we recently hired, I had a chance to talk with her about her experience at her previous job and then coming here. And one of the big factors was she was going from Excel spreadsheets to a purpose built program. And she just loved it so much that she thought it was easier to use. It was readily available for her. Just, again, fit with her generation. So that's just as an example in the real world space, how it's coming to fruition to attract these people. And we're and she's a rock star, so we're really happy to have her feel like we're in a good position for hiring. That's awesome. And that's a perfect segue into our next poll question. We've heard from university professors, we've heard from students that they are going to be looking for companies that use the software that they have learned in the university space. Now I ask the question to you. Are you looking, when you are looking to hire somebody new, are you looking to hire somebody that is currently familiar with whatever software you are using? Or is that not a big requirement for you? Are you looking just for somebody with a sharp mind that you can teach? And again, if the poll pops up, please go ahead and answer in the poll. Otherwise, feel free to answer in the chat. Okay. I see a few answers. We'll give, just another minute to see if any more answers come in. Bill, I love the plug. I love the plug. Jay, I totally agree with you on that one. So it looks like it's a it's a it's a slight mixed bag. We do see a lot a lot of people putting in yes for for regular they are looking for someone with experience in the solution that they currently utilize. And then I see some that are occasionally. With partnering with HCSS and Heavy Bib, one of the things that we are building is a doorway into that university space that allows you to to reach out to whoever your local university is and see who the top talent is coming out of that graduating graduating pool so that you have a much easier time finding that next rockstar employee. One of the other roadblocks that I have heard from many of our customers is just finding that new talent is becoming more and more difficult as time goes on. You know, I think of job postings and job descriptions. And you know, we've, for years put on, you know, we wanted Microsoft, like preferred skills or required skills, it would be nice to get to this required skill level where there was a platform or platforms that were so readily known that in any given discipline, you would have a great pool of applicants. But I think that if we're saying that an estimating program is a required skill, and you have applicants show up with industry knowledge and experience in that application, I think you're gonna find standouts pretty quickly. Absolutely. Now continuing on with bringing on new talent, it's not simply just that new talent wants to see that you are tech focused. They wanna see that the tech you are using is future focused. It doesn't do you any good if the if you are a tech forward company, but the tech that you have chosen is not forward thinking as well. If the solution that you currently have has no roadmap, has no plans for change. Well, what are you going to do when Windows comes out with a new update and your software solution no longer works? Are you confident in your solution being able to provide a solution that addresses that concern. Looking at heavy bid. For anyone in here that is unfamiliar with HCSS heavy bid, HCSS heavy bid historically was written in nineteen eighty six. It started out in MS DOS. It made the conversion to Windows. It is a forty year old application, but we are continuing to forward think. We have slowly over the years been bringing more and more feature sets online. And just recently, earlier this year, we launched a brand new application, full scale heavy bit on the web. It is a full desktop replacement. You have a web browser, you have access to the internet, you have access to heavy bid. There's no longer the concern of having to send data from one machine to the other, or making sure that you have a good network connection within the office. The VPN access, the RDP access, Citrix requirements that come with desktop application and security in the office, those are no longer a concern. Know, Erin, I'll add to that. I think the user experience is really, really important for younger generations. And as you say in the slide, the mobile friendly access, we see this a lot, not just with heavy bid. I mean, will commend you on your transition from the desktop to the web, because I think it's really, really been critical for the HTSS path and what we're talking about today. But having mobile friendly applications, because, I mean, that's, that's all of our lives. All touchscreen, we're all dragging, you know, things like that. That's how our world works these days. No, you're absolutely right. And whether or not you're doing things from your phone, or you've got an iPad or an Android tablet, it doesn't matter. You want whatever application you're using to be able to operate in there. You want to go straight from your laptop in the office or a desktop if you're lucky enough and just grab your iPad and go in the car, go to wherever you need to go and still have the same tools available to you. Having those tools available on the web makes that possible. Absolutely. And that is a huge draw for the new generation of estimators. Now, with that huge draw comes the onboarding aspect. So with onboarding new estimators, we want to talk about how we are actually getting them up to speed. We've talked about how the traditional model works. You bring in one of your senior estimators, you partner with them, or as Bill mentioned, you bring the project managers out from the field, and they're tagging along with them for six months to a year. It's going to be that long before you really see a return on your investment of hiring this new hire. And you kind of have to bake that in. Well, we're trying to change that. We're trying to make that process a little bit easier. You heard it from Melissa. You heard it from Bill on the chat. Heavy bid makes that process by orders of magnitude faster and easier. Not only that, but we give you access to a true twenty fourseven, three sixty five day support service. There is no phone tree. You call someone, you get somebody on the phone. You're not going to get we do not outsource any of our any of our phone calls. Everybody is local in Sugarland, Texas. So, you know, to, to a lot of our customers, that is, that is a big plus. With that support service, the onboarding experience becomes significantly easier. We have a, we have an academy that has curriculum for all of this, all of your new estimators to learn how to do specific functions if they do not already know how to do it from the university setting. What these two functions together allow you to do is spend less time taking time away from your senior estimator or your project manager and spend more time with your junior estimator, getting them ramped up, getting them into a productive mindset. You're teaching them how to bid your type of work, not how to use the estimating solution. And now you make your corrections during bid review versus all day every day. Erin, I'm glad you brought up the Academy because I think that one of the key factors to a success of any modern software application is, like, on demand training. And we run several systems here at Hua, and you can tell the difference, but, in the support and the help structures of each application and obviously how much time I have to invest in new hires or other department leaders in, know, a good on demand training system, I think, is crucial. Again, so I think HCSS does a really good job with that, because it I also think the younger generation, they're not really used to asking personal questions or like a question to another person. They're used to chatting. They're used to Googling things. And to have those resources available to them in the way that they learn and the way that they communicate, I think is really important. Yes. And as Bill mentioned in the chat, standardization is an important process of the onboarding. If you can standardize your software solution to now, all the estimator has to do is essentially learn what it is that we're building, and then draw the correct tasks, the correct crews, the correct productions. It makes the onboarding by orders of magnitude not only faster, but simpler. The question morphs from How do I do this? To Why are we doing it this way? Yeah. And, you know, I think that's more critical thinking skills, right? The understanding instead of just like the the technical click here, click there kind of thing. Yes. Absolutely. Bill, that was a wonderful point to point out. Melissa, I love the extra on top of that. So what does all that actually mean? It provides impact way beyond just simply onboarding a new hire. It gives you meaningful impact to your onboarding process. It takes you from three to six months or longer to under a month. Your senior estimators are not getting up because they're spending six months training a new hire. They're doing what they know how to do and they that's go out and when you work. It also improves consistency across your bidding platform. For those of you that are not using an a purpose built solution, you're using pen and paper, you're using Excel. What we have seen in the past is, especially with Excel, every estimator in your department has their own solution in how to estimate. It's not necessarily a rinse and repeat shell of an estimate. They've got their own rates. They've got their own indirects. They've got their own formulas. And at the end of the day, you trust that that estimator is doing what's best for the company and making you money. Moving to a purpose built solution, everyone is running the same formulas. Everyone is using the same rates, the same crews, the same productions, and now it's no longer a, well, where's the formula for this? Let's go to, you know, sheet AB, go look at cell, what is it? F seventy six and find the formula. Everything is right there on the screen directly in front of you. If for whatever reason, you don't understand the formula, you can't or something's not quite adding up. You have a full company backing you to find a solution and find an answer for you. Erin, I could get really passionate about this topic right here because I think impact is a big word. And I think the younger talent, they want to come in and make an immediate impact. You know, if we think about the younger generation, everything in their world works so quickly. It's kind of on demand instantaneous. The average tenure of people my age versus people twenty years younger than me, it's shrinking. So I think once we attract people, we have to get them to stay at our companies and we have to get them to want to build a career. And I think allowing them to make an immediate impact goes a long way to that, to retaining people. And the younger generations, they want to climb the ladder, but they want to do it so much quicker than people my age thought that it was possible. And offering them technology solutions, instant feedback from the field, and I created this estimate and I can get instant feedback from project managers or the ops team, I think is critical in that, in allowing them to make space for themselves. Absolutely. Now what Where where does all this kind of wrap up to? The whole point here is that heavy bid and HCSS as a company is committed to playing that strategic role, playing that middle that I guess middleware part of the program, helping you connect with the university space, get you that top talent and get you onboarded in a faster, more efficient way. Not only do you not lose six months of productivity, you might lose a week or two weeks or hopefully less getting ramped up, getting running. We also support during that onboarding effort with our award winning support and our academy space. And with that communication to and from the university space, the goal here is to help you hire and scale without that constant disruption to your operations. Yeah. I mean, I can't say it enough. I again, I'll say it's an investment, right, in both your people, in your business, in your bottom line. You choose where you spend your money, and I know these can be big decisions to make. Honestly, I can't imagine going back. We've been through this cycle. Can't say that it was easy, but I'm so happy I'm going to call us on the other side of it, where we're really seeing the return on our investment into programs and into people and figuring out what they need and what we can do to both find the top talent and keep them and keep them here with us to develop careers in construction. No, that is very well said. And kind of wrapping all of us up into the takeaways from from this webinar is get with your local university. If you don't know who your local university is, especially if you're a heavy bid user, get get with us. We'll tell you who the universities are that are using the software, and then we can get you in touch with who the top talent is coming out of the graduating class. We need to invest in the intuitive future focused software solutions that not only are going to provide you a benefit now, they're going to continue to invest in that software solution providing you benefits for years and years to come. As Melissa pointed out, change is not easy. Sometimes you got to bring your workforce. I don't necessarily want to say kicking and screaming, but they're not always on board. But what I do guarantee is that you will see returns on your investment. Leveraging that modern technology as a platform, not just as a single solution, but as an entire platform, will signal to those potential new hires that you are committed to providing them the tools they need to be successful. And providing the tools they need to be successful will end up making you even more successful. And then modernizing your company culture by not trying to stay in the past, but continue to look forward into the future. Look for ways that you can improve your productivity, improve your bottom line as a company. And sometimes that is spending a little bit of money on a software solution that is driven to make that a reality. Not only does it allow you to bid more work and win more work, but it's also going to help you monitor that work so that you can see when you're making money. It can you can see what you're losing money on much faster than at the end of the job so that you can make adjustments all at the same time affecting that bottom line, making that bottom line a lot bigger than what it currently is. Erin, you're absolutely right. And I think that when most people think about implementing a bidding software or estimating software, I think they're they're thinking the benefit is going to be financially or to operations, right? That we're going to increase our margins or have a better understanding of productivity, and we're gonna be able to build our projects better, or have a better plan to build our projects at least. And so this the second view, this other takeaway, that it's really a recruiting tool, I think, is amazing. And I'm I'm really happy that HCSS is presenting, estimating software in this way because the estimators and what we do in precon is so critical into the whole path of success of a construction project. And I think getting those good people there is is an added benefit and the rewards of a system or and good processes will go throughout. No, I absolutely agree. So I saw Tony posted in the chat. Yeah, if you have questions about connecting with your local university, please email universityprogramhcss. That goes straight to our university group, and they will put you in contact with whoever your local university reps are so that you can get the ball rolling on that. So if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to myself or Melissa. Our emails are right here on the board. And then again, the university program at HCSS, that is our, that is our group that focuses and builds the not only the university curriculum, but it also builds the communication pipeline between our customers and our university groups. So with that, I would love to open the floor up to general Q and A. You're welcome to use the Q and A panel, or since everybody is familiar with the chat now, we can just continue to answer questions via the chat, whichever you personally prefer. Well, are using the chat or the Q and A section. Definitely use my email or jot down my email. I'm happy to talk with any contractors out there who are contemplating changes in this world or want to hear about how our journey at Hua has gone. I'm happy to be a resource. Thank you very much for that. Thank you for attending the webinar. Hopefully everybody learned something, maybe had a change of viewpoint or a change of mindset from what maybe you were currently thinking before coming into this particular webinar.