Metke Remodeling & Luxury Homes has been in the business of enhancing peoples’ lives through transforming their homes for over 30 years. The Lake Oswego, Oregon-based business has stood the test of time because of its commitment to innovate to keep pace with the moving target that is residential construction.
As Nick Colaco, Metke’s production manager, explained, “The construction industry has changed so much over the years. Client expectations are so much different than they used to be.” Nick and his team’s response to those shifting expectations was a construction management platform that can change and grow to meet their needs.
A schedule that’s always up-to-date
Like many residential construction professionals, Nick used to provide Metkes’ clients with a schedule created in Microsoft Excel. And like other builders, the company soon realized the schedules they provided were out of date almost as soon as they were printed. Whether it was material delays, change orders, or other unforeseen issues, Metke was never able to efficiently provide their clients with up-to-date scheduling information. Nick noticed that this was frequently a problem with clients who struggled to understand why they never knew the latest schedule.
Metke listened to the feedback and made a change, bringing on CoConstruct’s construction management software. “The biggest benefit of CoConstruct is that rather than having to pull up different documents or have a chicken scratch calendar that only one person has access to, everybody is able to look at the schedule, and not only just look at it but edit it, make comments, assign tasks, and be able to follow up on those tasks,” said Nick of their new scheduling process.
Fostering better communication
Metke had good systems and processes in place for their business but they weren’t centralized. This led to disorganized and frustrating searches for documents across the organization. Today with CoConstruct everything has a place and is easily accessible, creating better methods of communication for employees and company systems.
“Communication through CoConstruct has been awesome,” said Nick of the transition to CoConstruct’s construction communication features. Previously an employee would get left off an email thread, or a salesperson would forget to relay a text message to the field team, but by using CoConstruct Metke prevents communications from falling through the cracks.
On the systems side, Metke has utilized CoConstruct’s construction accounting integration to have information from QuickBooks at their fingertips. “Now that we’ve integrated QuickBooks with CoConstruct it allows us to have real-time budgets,” said Nick. Metke used QuickBooks prior to CoConstruct but running reports was a time-consuming process so the company only did it once a week or every two weeks. Now, every time CoConstruct syncs with QuickBooks Metke gets updated information to keep their profit margins on track. This accounting integration has also transformed Metke’s time card management process. Instead of their bookkeeper manually adding entries into QuickBooks, all entries are pushed through an automated workflow.
Flexibility for the future
This infusion of streamlined information not only helped Metke shore up their present but prepare them for the future. “CoConstruct allows us to better forecast,” explained Nick. “It allows us to make sure that we’re looking at the company as a whole rather than just the individual projects.” This newfound perspective has greatly helped Metke continue to grow its business. The 22 employee company is on pace to double the 40 projects they completed last year.
Nick and his team are happy with their progress to date with CoConstruct but are even more excited for what’s next, including improving their change order process. “Being able to get a change order out quickly used to be this process of - I gotta go print this paper, and write this up, and get the client to sign it - But being able to send those so quickly is huge because it's easy to let those things slip and suddenly you're three or four change orders behind and it's a tough conversation to have with the client if you're not on top of it.” CoConstruct’s change order features allow Metke to effectively capture, document, and get paid for costs not in the original project scope.
In their quest for finding efficiencies and growing their business, Metke has never lost sight of their end goal of creating exceptional experiences for their customers. “At the end of the day, we try to change people’s lives through construction and it’s not always a fun process to go through a remodel but we try to make it fun and have as few speed bumps as possible,” said Nick.
