Name: How To Scale: Achieving Growth by Scaling Your Business Operations
Uploaded: 2025-03-12T17:31:10.713Z
Duration: 58 min 4 s
Description: How To Scale: Achieving Growth by Scaling Your Business Operations

Transcript for "How To Scale: Achieving Growth by Scaling Your Business Operations": All parts of the world where we have our audience drawing from. Our other speakers, Jen Clark and Jacob McIntyre, will be joining shortly. In the meantime, hang out. Get yourself a fresh cup of coffee or a glass of water, and we'll be starting soon. West Of The Rockies so far for our folks who are joining. Hey, Jacob. Welcome. Hey, Christian. Thanks. Madison, Wisconsin. Welcome. I'm in Madison, Connecticut, so we're sister cities. Welcome. Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome. Welcome. Jacob, what's, look out your window. What's the window look like today so far for you? That's dreary, rainy. That's intense. Wet. Yeah. Kind of flooding even. But Oh. But it's not super cold. So I'll check the silver lining. Alright. Yeah. It's, it's it's like like, the sun is shining beautifully outside my window right now. It makes me, like, wanna go outside because the temperature is actually behaving along with the sun. So it feels like maybe we're in spring here in New England. So Great. Well, why don't we, with, Jen should be joining shortly, our other speaker. So while we're waiting, I just wanna do a quick sort of, introduction to the audience here and let you know what you've all joined here for. So welcome to, the inaugural episode of Quickbase's How to Scale series. I'm Christian Potts. I'm director of public relations here at Quickbase, and I will be your moderator for today's discussion. As this is our first episode, I wanted to give a quick overview of what you can expect from the series. How to Scale is a podcast style conversation that covers the, topics of unlocking operational efficiency and productivity for, operations leaders like yourselves. We're gonna mix data, real world examples, and and, different strategies and best practices so we can help you uncover some of the most common challenges and then share some of those best practices to help simplify operations on your journey to drive growth in your company across any industry. Before we get started, we'd love questions from our audience. So please make sure to post your questions in our live chat, and we can answer them during the q and a session at the end of our discussion. So without further ado, let's go ahead and introduce today's speakers today. So I'm pleased to be joined, by Jen Clark. Jen is a technologist at General Sheet Metal, and also joined by Jacob McIntyre. Jacob was a colleague of mine here at Quickbase. He's a senior director of customer acceleration. And as I mentioned, I'm a Quickbase's director of, public relations. So Jen and Jacob will give you a chance in a second to say hi, but wanted to, just introduce you guys and make sure everyone can see, who's who's gonna be leading our discussion today. So Jen, why don't you go first? Amanda saying hello to the audience, introducing yourself. Hey, everyone. How's it going? My name is Jen Clark. I'm the integration manager here at General Sheet Metal. I've been using Quickbase for just over two years now. I'm excited to kind of talk a little bit about my journey and where we've come in the past couple years and how Quickbase has really changed things, here at GSM. We're a midsize sheet metal contractor outside of Portland, Oregon. Awesome. And Jacob, why don't you say hi? Sure. Yeah. Jacob MacIntyre. I've been at Quickbase for about seven years now. I was a customer just like Jen for about six years before that. So I've been, Quickbasing since, I guess, like, 02/2012 or something like that. And, yeah. So my group helps out people getting just getting started in Quickbase, through pilots or other, new initiatives, for for customers. Awesome. Thrilled to have you guys here. A couple of real experts I think our audience is really gonna, learn a lot from. So just a quick look at our agenda for today. So as I mentioned, it's the how to scale, podcast series. So first, we're gonna be talking through the phenomenon of, what we call gray work, which is essentially all the stuff that gets in the way, that makes scaling operations so hard. Then we'll ask Jen to take you through her own experience in improving efficiency and productivity at General Sheet Metal. And then Jacob will take us through how Quickbase can help and give us a couple of ideas, places to start, that I think will be really, useful for this audience. And then finally, we'll close with a q and a from you. So hopefully, you guys will be listening and posting your questions in the chat or in the q and a tab, on the right hand side of your screen. Alright. Let's get into it. So just really quickly, there's a hard truth that I'm sure this audience knows all too well. Operations is really hard. At any given time, you're managing people, cash flow, equipment, quality control, and technology, all while keeping an eye on external market dynamics, customer service and retention, ongoing continuous improvement efforts. It's a lot. And meanwhile, there's another challenge that's lurking under the surface of everything every day. It's what we at Quickbase call great work. So great work, you should think of it this way. It's essentially the time and the resources that you're probably spending every day on the tedious manual work that you have to do when the workflows and technology that you have on hand just don't work the way they're supposed to or the way that they've been promised to work. So all the value that comes from, implementing these new ways of working, implement implement into excuse me, implementing these technology solutions, it just doesn't deliver. It's just not there. And once you start to hear the term, you realize just how pervasive it really is. So a couple of examples. So think of all the switching between tabs and spreadsheets that you're doing when you're trying to pull together a quarterly report or the hours you spend trying to match CSV files to time cards when you're trying to run payroll, or maybe just that feeling of frustration when you're rekeying supplier invoices into spreadsheets or other applications over and over again. It's just stuff that slows you down. So at Quickbase, we've heard a lot of customers talk about this idea of, like, all the stuff that gets in the way of efficiency and productivity. And that's when we hit upon this idea of great work. So it is a true roadblock to efficiency, productivity, safety, and so many other key metrics that we know drive operations pros every day. So we wanted to see just how much great work is out there, what it look like, and how much it actually is impacting people on a day to day basis. So a couple years ago, we commissioned what we call our great work index. And so the methodology here is pretty it's it's pretty simple. We wanna get, you know, as many respondents as we can. In this case, in the most recent version, February 2024, we almost got 2,000 folks. We're looking across the markets that we know that people, that we operate in, where we know we can talk to, customers every day. So this is The US, UK, Ireland, a couple other places. And we're looking at industries that we know are traditionally very operationally complex. So we're talking about construction, manufacturing, health care, professional services, state and local government, and all kinds of other ones. And we ask them questions that really get at the heart of, like, what is really what's their day to day experience like when they're trying to get stuff done? So these are operations and IT leaders. These are, you know, rank and file employees. These are all the folks who everyday are interacting with information, data, you know, technology, and just the general processes to get stuff done. And what it showed is that there are some chief culprits behind this. There are things there's disconnected, disconnected data and systems. There are teams and there are projects that are spread across multiple locations and departments with no real way of communicating with each other. There's this network of physical assets that are dispersed all over the business, all over different projects, and all kinds of custom tools and workflows that just really don't work together. They don't work across the organization. And what's really interesting is that once you see it, you start to see it everywhere. But what does it actually look like? So that's what we wanted to start to uncover. So what does great work actually look like? So think about it. Think about all the different things that maybe you are living within a day to day basis. So you've got all this data spread across all these multiple systems. You've got all these physical assets all over the place. You've got all these systems of records, spreadsheets, emails, all these different things you're using on a on a regular basis. And in the meantime, you've got all these teams that are trying to work together and collaborate, and they're just not able to do so. So this is what it looks like through our survey. But to really get a feel for this, we wanted to bring in someone who maybe is living with this kind of experience every day, but moreover, is on a journey to really sort of solve this. And that's where Jen comes in. Jen is a real expert. Jen, would you mind just really taking the audience through what your experience was like when you were trying to share great work at general when you were trying to, excuse me, discover great work at General Sheetmetal, and then the journey that you went on to root out efficiency, to root out inefficiency, excuse me, and the productivity challenges that were holding you guys back every day. Yeah. Absolutely. So as I mentioned, my name is Jen Clark. I'm the integration manager here at General Sheetmetal. And I really started at GSM, little over seven years ago working in the field. I was a project manager. I was running construction jobs. I was on job sites, just trying to get work done and trying to find information. And what I kind of discovered, during my time in the field was just how complicated everything seemed to be. We had all these different systems that we were trying to use between our accounting system. We had a Smartsheet sheets in the cloud. We had folders on the server. We had folders in Dropbox somewhere. We had different project management cloud based tools. It was just a lot to try to keep track of. And so, in my time, I really wanted to try to simplify things, and make it as easy as possible for people to get what they needed. So some of the challenges that we faced, people are spending, you know, several hours a week manually updating information in all these systems. You can kind of imagine if you don't have all of your tools connecting. For example, we have a list of current projects. Keeping that current project list current and accurate in three or four different places was really, really hard. Same thing with employees or, any tracking numbers, budgets for different projects. And so we're just spending a lot of time manually keeping all this stuff up to date. Having disconnected systems, project managers had to look around, multiple tools just to find what they needed. I know that from experience trying to figure out where's this change order at. I'm looking at two or three different software tools. And then the data is just gonna be less accurate. If you don't know where to find it and when you do find it, it's all getting manually kept up to date. How much are you really gonna trust it? Which system is the most up to date? What is the system of record? What's the thing that you actually can trust? And in reality, they're they're all a little bit off depending on, what you're looking at in a given time. So the reason or when we were looking for kind of solutions to this let's go to the next slide. Yep. Wow. Oh, pardon me? So some of the options that we considered, we were using a lot of Excel spreadsheets, and we're also using Smartsheet to try to be a little bit more cloud based, but it just wasn't scalable. Trying to keep all these things current and getting all the data connected was was really challenging. And so it didn't really fit what we were looking for in terms of being able to grow our our business and our company, across different departments. And, it was really hard to keep everything consistent across different teams. We also looked at a lot of industry specific tools. Anybody who works in, you know, construction or manufacturing, there's a lot of, very specific workflows and processes that may not be, you know, universal. There's different challenges that any industry will face that's specific to them. So you would think an off the shelf product, that really matches your industry would be the best solution. But we really had a hard time finding something that integrated with our ERP or our accounting system. That was that was a huge challenge. And then not being able to kind of customize things, not being able to make it work with our internal processes was really was really hard. We're spending so much time trying to, get our workflow to work with these several tools that it it just was not sustainable. And then we also looked at Microsoft Power Apps, a great option if you are somebody who wants to build custom applications. But I just didn't think it was particularly user friendly. And even though it's a a low code tool, I still felt like I didn't know enough to be able to effectively build these kind of custom solutions here at General Sheet Metal. So you you, Jen, you you had, I noticed your title was integration manager. That's interesting when you talk about the specific tools. You, you had all of these tools and it and it was like, well, I you know, when it came down to it, it's them not talking to each other. So, just kind of thinking about your title there. Is is that maybe sort of why you are called the integration managers? Because you had to look across all of these tools and go, we have to have them talking to each other or else or else we have humans having to look through each spot and then make these decisions that that slowing you down. Yeah. Absolutely. To be honest, my title kind of came out of I was working in the field. I was running jobs, and I just saw this kind of gap within our company of just needing somebody who could take a step back, look at all these technology tools that we're using, and get them to make more sense together. So integration manager kinda came out of a lot of just brainstorming, trying to figure out what title made sense for what I kind of saw myself doing. And now two years later, I think that was a a very apt title, when it came down to it. Yeah. Yeah. We we see it all the time, and I just haven't seen that title, but it totally makes sense especially when you when you have on this slide, I'm thinking through all of your tools and and yeah, someone needs to coordinate, from the business side. Right? Some not not necessarily someone that that is only technical and doesn't know the business. So you're you're there sort of joining those two together. Right. Absolutely. So when it came down to choosing, Quickbase in particular, it was really a solution to a lot of these issues. We could make it industry specific because both through, templates that Quickbase already had prebuilt and then my knowledge of knowing how jobs worked, how our processes worked, how we needed to track certain things. I was able to build something that that worked for the industry. It was able to be customized. We could track what we want. We can make it, flexible and, adjustable, but it also could scale. And I think a lot of that has to do with just the way that that Quickbase, is set up as as a relational database and as this kind of cloud platform. So one example I like to give just to kinda condense all of these things that I've I've built over the past couple years into one specific workflow centers around purchase orders. Go to the next slide. How did purchase orders work before? This is honestly kind of how I I pitched Quickbase internally to our executive team trying to get them on board with the idea that we needed something a little bit different than what we were currently working with. So back in the day, purchase orders, people could submit them through three different forms, either through a Smartsheet online, through this other custom software plat or this other, construction specific software platform, or just email calling purchasing. So you're getting information from bunch bunch of different places. And then all that information was manually getting monitored by this one purchasing manager who then had to go make sure it all matched up in Smartsheet and then make sure it all matched up in our ERP, platform. And then the same purchasing manager is manually, you know, when a vendor sends confirmations, when we're sending POs out, creating those PO numbers to give to our project teams that they know what reference numbers to use, all super manual. And then even once, the order is placed, when you're getting invoices, when you're getting things received, it it it wasn't connected. And it was really hard to keep track of, okay, this order that I placed a couple weeks ago, where is it at? Did we get it yet? Has it arrived at our shop? Who's who's in charge of it? If the project team wanted to order something themselves and have a little bit more control over it, they were waiting for several emails back and forth to get that purchase order number, or they're relying on, you know, some spreadsheet and back office that hopefully has the the latest and greatest number, but they're not really being able to see what they they need at any given time. So as you can kind of tell, a lot of just manual duplicate data entry into multiple systems, which is just asking for things to be, inconsistent. It's asking for errors because it's just so hard to keep that all up to date. And things that we are putting in place to try to make communication easier, to automate notifications wasn't really worth it because you're spending so much time keeping all these different systems current. The time that you save, not sending off that one extra email, it didn't really make anything actually simpler. Going to how it works now with Quickbase now that we've been using it for a couple years, it is a lot more straightforward. So when somebody places an order, they place the order within Quickbase. They immediately get that purchase order number so they know what their reference number is. They can send that to the vendor if they need it immediately, or they could let our purchasing manager take care of it for them. And then our purchasing manager, he's only working in Quickbase. He's updating purchase orders in Quickbase. He's filling out information in Quickbase. And then everywhere else that needs that information, it's getting pushed automatically. So you're getting rid of all that duplicate data entry. You're just keeping it up to date in one system, which is so much easier to maintain and keep current, keep accurate, and just keep less complicated. Once orders get sent to the vendor and we we get invoice for everything, all of those costs, all that information, all that, when you're trying to do forecasting for a job and you need to know, okay, how many outstanding POs do I have, rather than looking in our ERP and then looking in Smartsheet and then looking in your job folder in some spreadsheet somewhere, it's all right there in Quickbase under that job. So, pretty simple, example, but it really highlights a lot of, the ways that we were able to use Quickbase to streamline processes that we already had in place. I saw a question come through in q and a. How long did it take to get this set up? Purchase orders, I mean, it's it's evolved over time, but I would say the initial creation of everything, a couple weeks. It was mostly just working back and forth with our purchasing manager and making sure that we're on the same page. And I think one of the the best parts of it is the fact that you can change things as you grow and evolve. So this is, you know, basic purchase order process, but ever since then, we've been able to do a lot of really cool stuff to expand the use case. One thing that I'm looking at doing in the near term is creating, a QR code, process where somebody in the field who may not have access to a computer or may be walking around a job site, can scan a QR code to place an order for standard material that they they need all the time. And then that's it. They're not sending emails. They're not going on to Quickbase. They're not sending in this they're not filling out a form. They're just scanning this QR code that says, hey. I need a new box of screws based on the job that I'm on. Take care of it for me. And then a couple weeks later, that box of screw shows up on their job site. So I think one of the best parts about, having a a platform like Quickbase that is, a customizable tool as well as, you know it's something to get it built, but it's another thing to have it be able to evolve and scale with you as you have other use cases, as you have new ideas coming from your end users. And I think a really important piece is just getting that buy in. So if somebody is using a new platform, it could be really, it could take a lot of effort to get people on board, get people used to it, get people control of something new. But when they say, hey, Jennifer. Can we do this? And I'm able to turn that around for them, you know, in a couple minutes, that says a lot about, the value that could base or or just simplifying your your processes into this one kinda cloud based tool, what it can really deliver for you. The buy in that I get because I can make those adjustments as we grow, as we scale, as we add more and more functionality into it, that's that's worth so much more than just, something getting up and running quickly at the front end. It's that continuous, addition of more and more value as we as we grow and develop. So just kind of some takeaways from what I've had from what I've encountered over the past, couple years using Quickbase. I think the big thing that it's made me kind of change how I I think about scaling and how I think about setting up operations and and software tools, is really building something or setting something up based on how you want things to work. I think, traditionally, we spent a lot of time forcing our processes to work with our accounting system or to work with Smartsheet or to work with some other project management tool. Now we can say, hey. How should this work for General Sheet Metal? And then we can have Quickbase match that and and deliver what we actually want, not what we're kind of forcing ourselves into. The other thing too that's been really huge is just, streamlining information. So purchase orders is one example, but, as somebody who is running multiple jobs, who was in the field, who didn't always have time to go jump around to different systems, being able to go to one place and see everything that I care about on my job in one spot, ease defined, couple of clicks, that's huge. So just getting everything as consolidated as possible has been a really big game changer for scaling. And I think, a kind of good example of this is, in Quickbase, we're able to have, different job records, and that job record has everything related to that job. It has financials, it has project logs, it has change orders, it has purchase orders. It's all on that one record versus, historically, you would have, different Excel files within one job folder, all tracking different things. And so you're have to go find the job folder and then open all the different documents to find what you're looking for instead of it being all in one spot. And then every time you have a new job, which we run hundreds of jobs every year, you're not going and manually creating all of these logs, all of these tracking items over and over again. They're just there because it's just a new job and Quickbase knows, oh, it's a job. I'm gonna have these things for it. And you have that consistency. You have that same template across the board. You just have it be so much easier to, you know, onboard somebody new, get somebody up to speed. Like, if you just say, hey. You're looking for something on your project and it's all right there. That's so much easier to train than, okay. Look at this system sometimes and this system sometimes and look over here every once in a while. You can just imagine how much that spirals. So just kinda consolidating everything in one place has been really huge for us, and just being able to scale that information so that it's consistent and usable. I think we're all on a journey to make data more helpful. We collect so much information. I know construction is notorious for collecting so much data, but so much of it, you you can't really use. It's not in a format that's helpful. It's, it's broken up among a bunch of different PDFs and spreadsheets and different systems. And getting it in one place, getting it streamlined, getting it organized because you're having people go through these specific forms to collect everything, that just opens up so many possibilities for, you know, data analysis, AI, I know is really buzzy right now, but, trying to get ahead of the curve on that and making sure that the stuff that we're doing so much work to collect all this information that we're we're working really hard to collect, make sure it's worth the time that you're putting into collecting it in the first place. Jen, how just kinda curious how you got started. Did when you first started this journey, were you kind of considering yourself someone that was technical or not so much? Or, had you had experience doing this? Or what what was your kind of launch point into, you know, we say m MVP on the last, box there on the far right. Mhmm. How did how was your MVP? Or how did and how did you start? Yeah. I would say I started off really as a a dabbler. So even when I was working on specific projects, I was always somebody who was trying to push what our systems could do. I was building fancy spreadsheets. I was building custom smart sheets. I was looking at different softwares. I I just like to dabble and see what was out there. And so I just think that that kind of curiosity is really what led me to this role of just I was looking at the way that our processes worked and how our company worked in a way that I think most people weren't because I went and tried to find all this stuff everywhere. I wanted to know how all these systems worked. And I and I think it just took a level of curiosity to really understand the business enough to then feel comfortable going and saying, hey. Do you mind if I change something? And getting the buy in and and knowing how to talk to people about that kind of change. Yeah. Yeah. And then what so do I don't know if you could remember back because now you've been doing this for quite quite a few years. But, that first, I don't know, that first app or or sets of tables. Do you remember what it was and and how you how you tried to get adoption and tell people, hey, I wanna try to use this. How was the how's the conversation and how how did that go? Sure. So the first things that I built were things that we had previously done in Smartsheet, and I really tried to make them fairly apples to apples so it looked familiar. It was a little bit easier to get people on board when it's like, okay. I know what these questions are. I kinda know what to expect. But then what was great and really exciting was being able to have those those conversations with the stakeholders saying, okay. What else would you like to see? How would you like to see it? Is there, you know, a a dashboard or or some high level information that was kinda hard to find before that now you want to be more accessible. So kind of taking things that they're already somewhat familiar with, so it's not super scary when they see it for the first time in Quickbase, but then being able to say, hey. Look. I can make it even better than what we you are accustomed to. And I think that went a long way to kinda ease people into it. Yeah. Great. Yeah. We we've seen we see we see a lot of this, and we try to tell people sort of the crawl, walk, run. The crawl is, you know, wherever you are in that messy scenario, the folder you suggest you you you mentioned with all of the spreadsheets and having to duplicate that. That's all. That's where a lot of people start. And then and then and it's okay to kinda just iterate on one MVP, one one idea that, you know, is maybe the most painful or maybe it's the most simple just to get that buy in. I remember when I when I first started, I think it was just an RFI log. And we were we were in the field and and, the it was a it was a simple way to say, okay. So if I can do that for this within the project and, you know, purchase orders are next and change orders are after that, and contracts are, you know, above that. And then we we just kinda kept building on, but it was a little by little that we could we could grapple with all of the problems. But, but certainly, you can't call everything once. Right? But, so, yeah, I wanted to go with your first what your first app was. Yeah. I think that's one of the biggest challenges is you wanna fix everything. You want to just build the best app ever that fixes all your problems, and I that's not realistic. I think a lot of it's just kind of taking it one step at a time and figuring out, okay, what's what's that biggest pinpoint that is worth, you know, trying to fix first and then just kind of working your way through little by little. Because on flip side of it is you're not overwhelming people with learning a ton of new stuff. You're getting them used to the platform. You're getting them used to, how to navigate and and how it works. And then as you add more more and more value and they have more and more reasons to go to it, it's just it it just snowballs pretty naturally from my experience. Yeah. Yeah. I I found it really rewarding to to, you know, if I if I got the feedback from from someone in the business that was was struggling and, you know, somewhere somewhere along the line we found a pinch point. And it usually this is kinda where the gray work comes in. That pinch point usually lands on one or a few people. And they really don't love their work. Because what they end up doing is they end up feeling like they have to cull through all the data. Like you said, they have a lot of data. And and and and then take it, maybe make some sorts of transformations in their head and then have to rekey it somewhere else. And that, if you're doing that many hours a day, it's not a very fun way to spend your day. And and you don't feel like, as a person that's been hired by the company, that you're really giving value, and it can make a an eight hour day feel like 12. And so so when they would give feedback on on, oh my gosh. You just saved me even just a few minutes. That kept me going to build more because it was like, oh, if if I I must be doing something right here. If if people like, you know, what we're what they're seeing and I can save them a few minutes every time, Eventually, that adds to hours and and and then now you're really making progress. Yeah. I don't know if you found the same rewarding side or not. But Oh, for sure. I mean, I was kinda mentioning it before, but just keeping, you know, budgets up to date across different systems, that's that is a really tedious, easy to mess up thing where you're just doing data entry. And it's so challenging. And I I would much rather have, you know, our admins, our project engineers, our project managers, you know, just looking at the information in one place and being able to see where there are discrepancies, not because somebody didn't key it in right, but because something's going on in that job. Like, that's what you want people paying attention to, not data entry typing things in over and over again. And I and I know it's been really rewarding, especially using some of the automation side of of Quickbase to take things that were a really manual audit that were just tedious and took a long time. And now Quickbase can do that for you so that you're providing more of customer service and and, being more of a resource for, you know, other workers and and doing a lot more of the fun interactive work, not just typing everything in forever. Yeah. Yeah. We're, as we see AI start to take shape and and, you know, you know, at least promise to do more eventually, the the human side of it seems like, you know, I wanna be able to make decisions for the company. Whatever whatever my jurisdiction is and within whatever my role is within the company, I wanna be able to make decisions, not just be a human integration where all I'm doing is taking data from one system and plugging it into another. That that, you know, it so yeah. Eliminating those types of things and letting people kinda make the more, you know, the smarter decisions. And and I think that's kind of one of my favorite parts of seeing seeing this, eliminating the great work or at least reducing it. So thanks for the story. If anybody has any questions on the purchasing or anything like that that Jen went through, her workflow, I think, you could post it in the q and a. We'll we'll get to it. Yeah. Christian, do you think it's time for going over to the to a quick demo? Yeah. Yeah. Let let's let's go for it. Thank you, Jennifer. Yeah. Jacob, let's do it. Okay. Great. Let's see here. So I think you stop sharing and then I get in there. Is that? Yep. Okay. Great. And while, while Jacob gets, set up, John, if you wouldn't mind, a question for me that I was I was thinking about. So we talked a tiny, tiny bit about everybody's favorite buzzword, AI. But I'm curious as when you think about things like AI, small picture of small bore, is that really where sort of where your focus is? Not necessarily on, like, you know, AI is a transformative thing for the entire industry, but more so, like, functional or, like, operational sort of, like, little parts where AI can make a real difference. Is that sort of, like, when you think about it, how you think about it? That's why I try to think about it. Otherwise, it gets a little overwhelming. For me, on a practical level, it's, you know, where can I use the the Copilot and the Chachi VTS of the world to just make my day to day job a little bit easier? But a lot of it, I see on the the data data analytics side. Like, we don't have a full time data analyst. I am not a data analyst. But if I can use some of these tools and get our information formatted in such a way that I can, pretend to be a data analyst and get some value on it, I'm I'm really excited about that. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to make things that are definitely value adds, but weren't necessarily super approachable without a lot of training and and learning and effort, are now going to be more accessible. And it's just trying to make sure that you're ahead of the curve jumping onto those opportunities. Yeah. That's great. Thank you, Jennifer. Appreciate that. Alright. Jacob, go for it. Sure. So yeah. I I'm starting us off in what Quickbase here calls the exchange. And we've got some apps here where you can kinda just start. I think Jennifer mentioned that that you know we've got we've got places you can start. So ideas and apps that have been put together as a starting place. I'm hopeful that what we've sort of talked through here is that this is this software is a little different. It's a it's it's meant to to grow with your company and grow with your iterative processes. So instead of snapping a line and saying okay we bought this software and what you get is what you get. You you can start from a place wherever you're at and as you move you can move it as well. So the software sort of, kind of follows you instead of, you trying to follow the software and whatever the architects designed and you just have to live with. You know, it's a little bit of a different mindset. And so you can start with some of these apps, you know, that we've that we've started and, and or you can start from scratch. Right? You can you can import a spreadsheet right at the beginning, and that can be how you start. But this is just one way. So, I'm showing you the exchange, and then and this is some spots where you can see some apps and even some parts of apps. So we kinda call them like modules where you can pull in maybe just, you know, a a certain table or two or just a formula. That's there's some ways you can do that. I pulled one in. So the, the CRM and bid management and then I think I pulled another one in of the project management. So we could just look and take a look at so here's the the CRM and bid management. Again, you can build anything on quick quick base. So so think of this as as a as a one one idea. Right? And you may not do bids this way, But, this is just a you know, you start with a lead tracking and you get in in some bid ranking and bid management, and this app can kinda help you start there. We put together so if you were to pull this one in, you'd have some instructions and it would kinda get you off the ground quickly. You know, and each each table has has some some, its own features. You could you can build all of this. You can make it colorful colorful, colorful and pretty if you want. These buttons are custom made for this app. So when you click this button, it takes it takes care of it. It sets this record from one status to another. Right? So this is all sort of part of how you can, design what you want to see. So when I you know, reducing number of clicks and reducing the number of things that you have to do to make the decisions, you can, use our charts, dashboards, reports to to really surface the thing that you want the person looking at and nothing else. No, you know, no noise, or less noise, I should say, and and more signal. Or is the port part where they they really should be interacting with things and then, you know, where they shouldn't. So you can remove fields and reports and things for certain roles, because maybe that would just clutter it up. And, I like to say that if if you've built the app right, you shouldn't even need to train people on it because, because I think, Jennifer, you kinda mentioned the the, if you put what is in front of them what they're already used to, what they're comfortable with, then there's not a lot of adoption curve. They they're already there with you. They they you don't have to say, hey. Oh, now we call this this in this system, and we call this this the other thing in this system. And and it can get confusing right out of the gate. So so that's kind of the power of the customization. So yeah. So any of these can be adjusted. You can go in and, you know, we're we're now we're editing a bid, right, for for this particular CRM. You can have, you know, all of this these tabs pulling in different information. Here is the the ranking that we gave it based on, you know, some rankings in inside. You can put schedules together, quotes, you know, the list goes on. This was, this was built by somebody that had, you know, knew that there was kind of a gap in in how we, rank bids in the market. There's not a lot of software out there that will do just that. And and maybe you have a very your estimating teams have a very specific way they wanna do it. And so, this is one option. So, you know, and this one's pretty, you know, this one can get in-depth. I also pulled a very simple one in. This is just a a much simpler app, project inventory. So that's just, purchase orders, line items within the purchase orders, and then inventory tracking. Right? So, if I wanna do a new purchase order, I can come in here and, you know this can be as simple as a as a purchase order can be. Right? Just a just a vendor, some notes, a status, the date and and then you can put some line items within it. What's you know, this is kind of the if you you know, if you consider yourself, well, I'm not very technical. I couldn't I couldn't do, you know, this. You you might be surprised. There's, you know, this is a lot of drag and drop features here where you can you can reorder things and and and design exactly what you want. And when I hit save here, this form is is live for folks. So it immediately can make those changes and be really agile. And and so you can you can do that and or you can decide to do it in stages and be a little bit more thoughtful and not change change things as people are going. But that's kind of how, you know, you start building. You can add fields. You can add reports. The it's a really robust system that will allow you to, custom tailor exactly what's on screen and exactly what, you know, the rules are for certain fields and and how that data, once you hit save, maybe that goes and pushes to another system. Maybe it goes to another table in Quickbase. Maybe it sends a Slack message. All sorts of different options that you can create, and and, you know, reduce that gray work. So, yep. So just kinda flipping through some of the options and and and the, you know, showing you how this can work. One of the features in in Quickbase is what we call pipelines. And that's that pushing data to and from systems. You know so so if you have many systems of course then you can you know in in most cases if it's got an API you can you can actually push that to and from. And and, you know, in some cases, that takes a little bit of code, and we can help out with that. In other cases, we have prebuilt channels, that that already that are already set, and you don't have to think about APIs or or anything like that. So, I just pulled in, you know, Outlook. So if a if a if a calendar is updated or I'm sorry. Inventing my calendar is updated, then go send a Slack message to a certain channel. Super simple idea, but, you know, you can you can add layers and filters and logic to continue saying, okay. So when this happens, I want something else to happen and I don't wanna have to touch it. I want I want this system to go talk to other systems. Jennifer integration manager title made me think of we should show some pipelines here. So, that's one option. The other one, there's some cool things is we keep adding channels to this to to pipelines. And so one we're we've added recently is OpenAI. So you can actually you know when you trigger in this case I've I've built a very simple one. When someone creates a record in a certain table in Quickbase send send certain pieces of data over to a OpenAI and maybe you give it a prompt where you want, you want it to go, you know, summarize a transcript or something for you. Or you wanna summarize a long email perhaps. You could take it from email OpenAI and then go put a record. So there's there's so many ways you can do this. And and and as you can see it's all sort of drag and drop. There's there's opportunities in here to get pretty technical with you know, some some regex and things like that. But you also can start without having to know any any sort of code. So yeah. That that's sort of what I wanted to show you guys. Any thoughts, Jen, as I show some of the stuff, from the easy to the hard to the to the pipelines? Yeah. I mean, I can vouch, for pipelines and for quick quick base overall. You really don't have to know code. I've learned to, again, dabble a little bit here and there with some some HD HTML and some, like, API related language. But I really started off with Quickbase not knowing anything, coding related and leaning on just the drag and drop features and and the no code, type of style. And I was able to build a ton with with just that. And I think it's kind of as you've learned and grow, you can get fancier. But even with just using the basic functionality, and all of the resources that Quickbase has, I I think it's, I've found their, training resources and and support system pretty robust and really helpful for me. So it did not take long to feel comfortable building. And then as you get better and better, you can get fancier with things, but you can accomplish a lot with with really just totally no code learning the basics of the platform. Yeah. Yeah. We we like to say crawl, walk, run. Right? So just to start somewhere and, it's a it's a it it can be really impactful. I think you a lot of times people are surprised in what they can create in even just a couple of hours. You know, if you're used to spreadsheets and you you can kind of do, you know, formulas in in in Excel. Our formulas mimic Excel in in a lot of ways. So you so if you know sort of some basic formulas even you could you can get started. If you're a little bit more of an intermediate Excel user sort of you're getting into VLOOKUPs and that sort of thing, that's when, those are the folks that I think maybe, are are the best suited to come in and go, okay. So really, I I'm I'm smart enough to know in this technical space how to kinda handle Excel, And and Quickbase can just be a a better tool. It's you just take those same skills and you just you get to upgrade your tool set. So yeah. And and and actually that was one of the questions I had for you, Jen, is is you you know, you said you you were you didn't mention how technical you were, but you did say it was curiosity that kinda pulled you along. And but have you done anything like this before, before your journey? No. I I'm good at Excel. I would say I I'm a was, like, an Excel kinda power user, so I like vlookups and index matches and doing lots of math in there. But, really, I was just taking that and then, just my time working in the field and kinda bringing in that more project and process specific experience that then I I just latch on to put base right away because it just it solved a lot of problems that I didn't think would be that easy to solve. And it was just really exciting to see, oh, this this platform works the way that I had wanted other platforms to work. That's cool. That's great to hear. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Speaking of, everybody's favorite s word spreadsheets, I wanna sort of, like, if you wouldn't mind, Jen, question for you. So, you know, spreadsheets are 40 years old now. They, you know, they've just I think they're actually turning 40 this year, which, is kinda crazy. But I you know, we're never gonna get people completely off spreadsheet. So how do you sort of live in that world where you know that most people start with a spreadsheet? And what's like, when you think about kind of the change management aspect of that, like, how do you sort of, like, talk to people about their your ability to take them on that journey where maybe a spreadsheet is a good starting point, but, like, really, you wanna get them to a place where something like Quickbase is much more part of their world? I mean, if they are really comfortable with the spreadsheet, I love if they can show me what they're working on. If they if they say, hey. This is how I like to work. This is the the spreadsheet that I use for everything, and I'm really attached to it. That's great for me because it tells me what they're looking for and what I can kind of start targeting to build in Quickbase. And I think Quickbase is a really great tool to replace spreadsheets over time because it structurally looks fairly similar when you're kinda starting off with the basics, but it just saves so much time and effort when it gets to talking between different ones. And I think it's all about, you know, scaling and just getting those those things populated automatically, that you you get a really big selling point. So I love it when they come with come to me with the spreadsheet because I could kinda use that as my starting point and then just show them, hey. Look look how much easier this is to use because it can do the math for you, pull the information for you. It can reduce the amount of just upkeep that you have to deal with working with it without without looking scary, without looking totally alien. So it's a really good starting point for me, and I try to embrace it so that they feel like I'm hearing what they care about. Yeah. It's great. Jacob, you you you saw the question and answered the question about, OpenAI integration. I think generally speaking, not to put you on the spot, but when you think about our own journey Quickbase's own journey with AI, you know, it's obviously something that's on the minds of a lot of people. Like, how do you sort of think about that when you are building or when you're talking to folks who wanna build? Yeah. Yeah. I think so, AI is, really good at some things. And and I what what I think is promising about it is that, it's good at at at doing things quickly that that we really aren't. It's bad at doing things that I think we would rather be doing. The decision making and and the the, you know, the, the our context awareness of how our business works is really really hard to give to any sort of AI model. Right? So, but it can, you know, in many cases take, you know, I think many people that have been playing around with it. It's really good at summarizing. It's really good at taking a ton of text and and and summarizing. It's really good at, even looking at some code and, you know, translating it to those of us who would consider us ourselves not coders, not developers. I'm not very technical. So for those of you who've been playing around with it, I think you you start to see it. It's good at translating, and summarizing. And so anywhere in your workflows that you could use a little help there. I think that's kind of where we, where we see the the best use cases come come along. So yeah. Great. Great way to sort of think about it. Appreciate that. Alright. So, we're, near the end here. So just to sort of, quickly wrap this up. So, again, if folks have, any questions oh, there we go. There's a question right there about pipelines. I I think, Jen, you talked about this, but is there anything you maybe wanna add about your experience using pipelines, Jen? Yeah. For me, pipelines has really been huge because of how easy it makes it to automate things. One example is we use pipelines to export our, payroll information from Timecries and Quickbase to our accounting system. And just moving information back and forth, that's one thing. But what it really delivers is being able to do a bunch of audits that used to be manual. So being able to look at all of these records and, put the correct, you know, cost code into it, or if it matches these criteria, then adjust something on it. I know for construction, we have, certain things we have to pay people extra if they're working, you know, a swing shift or if they're working in a hazardous condition. So by being able to flag those things from their time cards and then have Quickbase deal with the math and the adjustment portion, by the time we get that export file that goes into our ERP system, it's already cleaned up. So that saves, you know, hours every week from our payroll manager of not having to go comb through all these line items in our ERP, making sure that they're correct. And instead, she could just focus on following up with somebody who maybe forgot to submit something or that has more of a general question and just providing that kind of customer service, not going through line items and auditing manually. So it's been really great at kind of those multi step cleaning up information before we move it somewhere else beyond just the the connection point. And it just makes it really easy to to automate tasks. I love using it as kind of a mini little agent that just saves me having to go do five steps because I could tell it to take me from step one of clicking the button through step 10. It can handle two through 10 for me. I just have to do that initial start. So I found it super valuable just just to automate, things that used to be pretty manual. That's great. Question for both of you. What's one future use case or maybe one application that you maybe have on your radar that you're thinking about where Quickbase maybe can start to push into? Jacob, why don't you go first? Sure. Sure. Yeah. One one that I'm doing sort of internally here is that I'm excited about is to take, meeting transcripts and to pull out insights out of those meetings that, would be useful downstream. So as we go talk to customers and and figure out what it is they need help with, sometimes people will go into some backstory. They'll go into some, you know, why this is important that they're trying to fix it. And then and and then they'll go into more of the technical. And that back and forth where where in some parts of the conversation it will be more technical. And then they'll they'll say, and and by the way and then they kinda go into, like, their the backstory. Those are both really helpful pieces of information, but they need to be parsed out. The technical needs to live in one space. And the business reasons and and and things like that need to live in another space because we kind of use those differently. And so we're I'm excited to kind of take the I think I showed the the OpenAI. You know, we're actually gonna take transcripts and and be able to, you know, we we we scrub it from names. Right? It's all we're sending is text. But but help me summarize the the business any business goals that you could kinda parse from that from that transcript. And then help me, understand if there's anything technical. So that afterwards it can be it can be really organized for the person that can that can, you know, look and and what what came out of that call and maybe what follow-up items do I need to to work on. So I'm excited about that one. I love that. How about you, Jennifer? So one thing that I'm planning on tackling in the not too distant future is, lessons learned. So every time we wrap up a project, we have a a close-up meeting to kinda talk about how everything went. And currently, we store all of our notes from those meetings in, you know, a PDF and an Excel file. There's a couple of different files that go into it. And so moving that information from these kinda just files in the folder somewhere into Quickbase that you have, really more of a a database around it that can then be searched and utilized by our estimating and sales team for the next round. It'll just it'll just make it a lot easier for them to go back and say, okay. For a job around this size for this client, what have we run into in the past? And so just making that information a lot more accessible is is something that I'm planning on hopefully tackling, in the not too distant future. And what what I love about that too is that I think that in a lot of ways kinda echoes back that comment about AI, which is AI should be something that becomes an addition to or an automation of something like what you described. You know? So, for example, I can see that, you you know, that being a step towards a path where you're starting to apply, like, you know, LLMs and AI to start to pull these things out automatically so that you're now skipping a couple of steps maybe where you still still have the human interaction. You're getting to that decision point quicker. Sort of echoes echoes Jacob's comment about, like, it's not about, like, you know, creating something new. It's about making something more useful and something more automated so intelligence from the from the person who's involved can be added. It. That's okay. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you both. Really appreciate you guys. Really appreciate the discussion. Thanks to our audience for these questions. I think we're really thought provoking stuff. I suppose we wind down here a couple of quick reminders. So first off, you can see that QR code on your screen. Go ahead and scan that if you're interested in learning more. It's gonna take you to a free trial, so you can go check out, Quickbase on your own. Couple of other things. Don't forget to check out the Quickbase blog where we have all sorts of insightful and useful content. You can find that at www.quickbase.com backslash blog. We talked about gray work. If you were interested in checking out our gray work index report now, in its second edition as of last year, third edition coming soon, check that out, on our blog. It's in the great work index. You can search on great work index in the blog, and that'll take you to our latest, discussion of that index. And then lastly, we are hosting our annual empower event, and it's back in person this year. It will be in New Orleans from March 31 to April 1. We got a jam packed agenda, which I believe, Jen, you're gonna be a part of. Jacob's gonna be there as well. So if you wanna meet these guys in person, we've got product review product reviews. We've got demos. We've got customer stories. We've got keynotes, all kinds of good stuff. So visit, www.quickbase.com backslash empower for more details and to register. And I believe we've got a number of different promotions going on. So if you act fast, you can probably take advantage of those so that you can, use those when you register. So with that, I think we'll say, goodbye for now. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Thank you, Jacob and Jen, for, sharing your perspectives today, and look for the next episode of How to Scale coming soon. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody.