Running a construction business comes with constant demands—but it doesn’t have to feel chaotic. Erik Jensen of Sprucehill Homes shares the systems and leadership strategies that helped him bring order, accountability, and long-term growth to his company. 

This episode is sponsored by Telelink, 24/7 live answering services for the trades.

Access the full show notes here: https://reflectivemarketing.com/podcast/erik-jensen-working-smarter-to-double-your-contracting-business/

Welcome back to the Beyond the Tools podcast. I'm Krystal Hobbs and today I am speaking with Eric Jensen, also known as the Boss Man at Spruce Hill Contracting. Eric is based in North Vancouver in BC. He started his company in 2006.

And we will talk about how he has made Spruce Hill one of the most organized businesses in the trades and break down how he was able to double his team in just a year and some of the critical factors to their success from how they use systems and processes, how they treat their sub-trades.

great guy and I think you're really gonna enjoy this interview and ultimately improve your business just from having listened to it. So let's head on over and hear from Eric.

All right, Erik, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to have you here. Thanks for having me. So I want to give a bit of context for our listeners here without going into all the details of what's happened between 2006 and now, but I guess to set the scene of where you're at, where Spruce Hill is, you quit your job in IT to start swinging hammers, as you said in 2006. Yep.

dominating the North Shore of Vancouver. We're trying. We're trying. Yep. I love that. And I know that you say you're one of the most organized construction companies in the business. How has that helped your growth or what's been so pivotal about how you run your business? My background is computer science. And so I've always liked

to have information to make decisions from. right from day one, I always knew that I wanted to know how profitable we were on each job. wanted to make sure that our projects ran smoothly. our customers honestly have been the most influential on how we do business because

After every project, we do a debrief with our clients and ask, what went well, what didn't go well, what should, you know, start, stop, continue. and, every client has given us a little something along the way to help us. Polish things. And I I don't think it requires a degree in rocket science to realize that if you want to grow your business, you have to have an organized business. if you're, you know, pushing paper and

getting out your abacus to do your accounting, you're going to have a tough time growing in this day and age. one thing that I've always admired about how you work is, there's data driven, but also very process driven and thinking about things in a very systemized way. I'm curious, I guess, if we can dig into that, particularly with how you manage clients and their

projects, like what are some of the hard lessons you've had to learn along the way?

Hard lessons. Probably the hardest lesson that I've had to learn is how to ask for money and not to be afraid to ask for it. think a lot of people, or at least seeing from my own personal experience and speaking to younger contractors, I think a lot of people are afraid to ask for payment and that can really hurt your business, especially when you're starting. Certainly having...

systems and whatnot in place to make sure things go smoothly is critical. when you say asking for money, how does that break down on a practical level? Well, when I first started,

I was always gun-shy to ask for money because for whatever silly reason I had in my head, I shouldn't be asking for money unless I've done some form of work. invoices pile up really fast. if you don't have cash in the bank and if a client decides to say, well, I don't want to pay you, sure, you can go through the lien process and try to like,

chase down the money and whatever else, but who has time for that? Like if you're busy chasing money that's owed to you, how are you going to have time to chase new business and engage with new contacts to garner new business? I know that part of that, I guess, is being proactive. So how do you figure out, you know, deposit? What's the system that you guys have there?

now so that you are getting paid upfront or paid at a frequency that makes sense. Yeah, so we take what we think is going to be the highest weekly. certainly one way to make sure that you get paid is by sending your clients regular invoices. That's a pretty smart thing to do. I don't I choose to do weekly simply because

you know, on larger projects, the bills can add up very, quickly and you can find yourself in the red very, very quickly. we look at historical projects and we kind of sort of try to take what we think is the average of the higher weekly invoices. And we use that as what we ask for our deposit. And the idea being that theoretically at no particular time, we won't be out of pocket.

is what we're aiming to do from the get-go. That makes sense. How does it work if you are going over budget? does that happen? How do you manage that side of the product? It's construction. we have had a couple of projects that came in on budget, believe it or not. It does happen.

but it obviously doesn't happen very frequently. We found that you have to have, just because you're invoicing once a week, also need to have some sort of report to tell you what the financial health of the project is. So over the last 17 years, we developed, I mean, I'm a little bit biased, of course, but I'm going to say second to none reporting for construction. And we're able to,

very quickly see where we're going over budget or if we're going to go over budget simply by looking at where we're at in the project and seeing how much we have left in the different cost categories. Again, you we've developed 36 or 37 different divisions over the years and under each division there's anywhere from two to eight subdivisions to help break down costs and make sure that we've thought about

estimating for each different aspect of the project.

That's awesome. was that something you've always done from the beginning or? no, there's been a lot of trial and error. And again, that list has changed over the years, with new technology and new building code, you know, for example, we never used to have HRVs as one of our cost codes that we budget for. now

I you can't build a house without one. Same thing for exterior insulation. That's now far more common practice than it used to be. So we've had to add that into our budget list. there's certainly things that were on our item list that we've removed just because we stopped using it. It became not in vogue.

And I know you joked about needing to have everything on a scrap of paper sort of thing. So when you're looking at costing and budgeting and all those things, what tools are you using to make that easy? Yeah, so we use the two pieces of technology that we use the most heavily are Smartsheet and QuickBooks. Currently, we're using QuickBooks Enterprise, but

FutureState is hoping that we don't need to and we can actually use the QBO because I've customized Smartsheet so much so that I don't need QuickBooks Enterprise anymore. we've created really, really easy to use templates in Smartsheet that allow our project managers and our clients and our design team to all see everything about the project.

I always go for within three clicks, generally I try to have it within two clicks. So you click your mouse two or three times and you'll be able to find the piece of information that you're looking for, be it a selection, be it how much is left in the budget for something or how much is left in the project. mean, again, Smartsheet offers so many automations to let clients, trade partners.

Project managers myself know of milestones that have been missed or milestones that are coming up, budgets that are going over. really, Smartsheet is a very useful tool for me. And was that something that your team adopted right away or how did you get your team involved in looking at projects and, you know, not just having that visibility, but actually using it?

You know, it took a little bit of convincing. I'm not gonna lie. And I think being an owner of any business, you have to have a steady hand and kind of see, you know, what the future of your business is. And I knew that having some sort of project management tool was gonna be critical for the success of our business and our clients.

And so it took a little bit of time for the guys to buy in to using Smartsheet, but honestly not much because they just found that they didn't have to think so much and that they weren't dropping as many balls and it just made their lives easier. They had to get a bit more comfortable with technology, which made their lives a little bit more difficult, but that's a short-term thing. Like, I mean, even though we're old dogs, we can still learn new tricks. I love that. And I think that brings up a good point because

A lot of times in this industry, you're working with your hands. You're not necessarily someone who loves to embrace technology. How has that been different for you? what's your view on technology in this industry? Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that I'm like unique because I know that there's several other contractors out there that have a similar background, but I have my degree in computer science. And so

You know, that education gave me a really solid foundation to understand project management, risk management. The parallels between developing software and building a home are many. It's so, so, so similar. And so, I mean, at the end of the day, as builders, we're primarily problem solvers.

in order to solve problems more effectively and efficiently, you got to use technology. And it's my, it's my heartfelt belief that if you refuse to adopt to technology, you are going to find yourself out of business in the next 10 years. It's going to be adopt or die. what are some of the things that you do to keep up on technology and like what's

coming in industry. for me, trade shows are really helpful. Builder Shows is really the best place to get on top of that sort of stuff in terms of understanding technology.

just exposure, there's really no other way to get there. If somebody's looking for, you know, first steps.

take a typing course, take an Excel course. Typing to me is one of these things where I don't know why it stopped being taught in high school. It feels like it has, but if you can't type 50, 60 words a minute, it's gonna really hinder your ability to be a productive entrepreneur, Emails need to be typed. mean, of course you can dictate, but.

If you have the same experience as I do with dictating into Siri, it's not always accurate. Yeah. And as the wife of a high school teacher, I can confirm there's no typing class at least. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's such an important skill.

we've done business together and I've seen how reflective works. You know, you guys have a very slick CRM where you're managing potential leads and you've got a bunch of automation and reminders and that sort of thing going on in there. because of my background, I've been able to make smart sheet work as a pretty good CRM. it's not.

a out of the box customer relationship management tool. And it's not perfect, but the price is right. And it works. It works.

Pretty well for what we do. it's probably somewhere in the 90th percentile of excellent, I mean, find me a tool, another tool that is perfect. I'm sure you have your issues with the, what's the system you use? It's high level right, yeah. Yeah, no, I think that brings up a great point. Obviously,

technology and all these tools, you can get a tool for everything. It's great, but unless you have a system and process behind that, it's not going to solve anything for you really.

back when, you know, you were small and then you start adding team members and projects are getting more complex and higher end, bigger projects. How did you go about finding the right tool or

customizing the tool to really work for Spruce Hill. It's straight up trial and error. probably over the last 17 years, hundreds of hours using different pieces of software. And honestly, how I've got Smartsheet set up has been highly influenced by interfacing with other pieces of software. And I've recognized things that the other piece of software is doing and being like,

I can make that work in Smartsheet. I can use Smartsheet to make most of that functionality work. so when I started out, tried UDA Construction Suite. I tried Co-Construct. I tried Builder Trend. I've used Streak for my CRM.

I was so offended by how dumb the name change was that I stopped using the software. It was really good though. I just hated the name so much. I'm like, what does Copper have to do with CRM? Like this is idiotic. They should have had you in their focus group. dude. I just thought it was so dumb. But you know, they did it anyways. So.

and I think they're still in business. It was a really cool piece of software. It plugged into Gmail really nicely, which is what we host our email system on. Right. OK, so you tried all these different tools, world things that you liked from them. And is it most impactful in being able to manage projects and see where things are? Or what's

what do you think is most impactful about the setup that you have?

Well, the tools that we've developed really help us to.

have a high level look as to how much business we have to go through over the next month, two months, six months, year, almost two years now, which is pretty cool. But then it also allows us to really drill down and look at the day-to-day activities that are required for each project. what I tried to really focus on

over the years is figure out the stuff that matters. I think that's probably the most important thing that we can do as business owners, both of us honestly, is going through the world, getting inspired, going to some seminar session and be like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing and being totally inspired to do it. And then you take it back home and two or three weeks later, like, eh, I mean, that was cool, but it's not that cool.

But then sometimes you get that one nugget and it's a complete game changer. one of my strengths as a leader is to recognize the good nuggets and the bad nuggets. And it's similar to the age old story about recruitment and employees.

hire slow, fire fast. I mean, the number of times that I've talked to employers, At least half of my close friends are entrepreneurs. And the number of times where they finally let somebody go and then the rest of the team starts barging into the office saying like, dude, I can't believe it took you so long to can that person. It's like,

Well, if they were that bad, like, let me know. I don't want to keep somebody that's useless around. help me out here. So true. And why do you think that is?

nobody wants to be responsible for that, for somebody's ability to pay their bills. mean, it's, totally understandable. It's just frustrating as a business owner. And do you feel that over the years you've gotten a lot better at hiring and also knowing when to let someone go? definitely a lot better.

how I deal with things now is night and day different from how I used to deal with things whenever it was, you know, 15, 14 years ago when I first started employing people. yeah. I know at Spruce Hill. Your team is obviously a cornerstone of your success there. And you've been able to double your team in the last year. how did that happen?

I think by being genuine.

You know, our recruitment ads are not stuffy. They're not corporate. They're, they're me. And, you know, I always ask people like, well, you know, why did you apply or whatever else? And like, well, I read the ad and it just sounded real.

It's genuine. And I think my approach to my team is to be really genuine. I mean, we've known each other for almost a couple of years now, I guess. And I've never been one to hide how I feel. I've been a part of business groups where

people are like, well, you know, as a leader, should never show fear, never, never show that you're sad or upset or anything like that. And I, I beg to differ, maybe not showing fear. That's probably not, that might be one to avoid. I'll have to concede that. not every day is a good day as the boss. I don't think there's anything wrong with sharing that and being like, you know, it's not having a good week.

I think by sharing a little bit of who you are personally, it really helps to build a really strong culture within the team.

I'm curious about turnover. have you seen that directly relate to how committed how long people are with the company? So just because I happen to have this sheet open, can factually state that the average is 2.76 years. However,

That 2.76 years includes one person that is 0.16 years on the team. Another that's 0.2, another that's 0.25, another that's 0.28, another that's 0.3, and another that's 0.43, and another that's 0.49. And those are all obviously reason hires to your point of having doubled the team in the last year. We literally did. So we do have a fair number of people that have been on the team.

quite a bit longer. We've got a couple of people that are reaching their 10 year anniversary with the company actually this month. Wow. Which is pretty cool. That is so cool. I'm pretty proud of that. I think that's really neat. I think it's pretty cool that these people choose to stick with me and keep me on as their leader. I don't see it as a one way street. It's certainly a two way street. And besides that,

genuine approach that you have to leadership and the culture that's behind that, guess, what are some of the things that really keep people around beyond that?

I it's been my experience that people don't like. mean, I speaking from my own personal experience and I try to run the company similar to what I like and don't like personally. I never liked being told to do something poorly. That never felt good. And that's just not something that we do. I never liked having my paycheck be late or not arrive.

I can be on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. And if there's an issue with payroll or something like that, I'm paying for whatever internet connection I need in order to be able to make sure that money is arriving in the team's accounts when it's supposed to be. think that that is a hugely important piece of it. Regular raises, paying your people.

a little bit more than fair market value is going to make sure you find strong people and you keep good people too. think a lot of, I think a lot of the time.

some people lose sight of how expensive turnover is. You know, I think you and I can both speak to this. Right? Like, you know, to get somebody, to get somebody truly operational and operating at a high level of success within my organization anyways, it's a three to six month process. I mean, that doesn't mean that they can't do anything, you know, before that, but

in order for people to actually feel comfortable with all of the technology and all of the bits and bobs, it's six months. And, you know, the feedback that I've received from recently hired people is like, really, it's a year. And after a year, it's like, okay, yeah, that's here, that's here. This makes sense. This makes sense. Like it all starts to click, right? And I, and I, I believe that that transcends any and all businesses,

until people are able to really connect all the dots in their brain and understand how things work, they're just not as effective. And I would also say not as happy because it's not fun to be working and doing something where you don't feel like you really know what you're doing. Like it's really fun to be working someplace where it's like, yeah, I get this and I'm having fun, you know.

Yes. And the depth of experience and what you're able to contribute, I think, when you're in a place for a long time. But I know that's something, you know, in paying your team well, I know that's something that with some of my business coaches in the past that I've come up against in terms of like, you know, you could hire someone for half that. Like, I don't want the employee that wants half that, you know? Yeah, exactly.

regular team building exercises, getting to, I mean, I take our guys out for, and gals out for, clients once a month. we're going to be going go-karting next month. we did a company camping trip last year, Cause my second favorite thing after being a mentor and,

and a dad and whatever else family is, can't be. Love it. I love that so much. And when you do that, when you do those kinds of things, guess, I do see sometimes in the construction industry, like a bit of a divide, I guess, between people that work in the office and people that work in the field.

Do you find that? that something that has been an issue? Yeah. And I try to make a bit of a conscious effort to make sure that people are sitting not within their comfort zone, at least for the first half hour, an hour of getting together, just so that people have to interact with everybody and talk with the people that they don't get to see. that's what

That's part of what builds a team is having some form of relationship, even if it's small, with the other people on it.

How do you extend that culture, those relationships with sub-traits?

My sub trades are invited to the camping trip and I pay for them. Amazing. how do you do that? There are people that we're working with now. some of them have been forever, but you know, one of the things that my business coach

one of the things that he told me was, you know, when you are planning a company trip or you're planning on doing something with, with people, that is a team building exercise, you really ought to be doing it with the idea that like whoever is on the team is going to be on the team for the next five years. And just because somebody just joined the team last week.

doesn't make them any less important than somebody that's been on the team for the last five years. In fact, one could potentially argue that they're more important because this is going to be fresh blood. This is somebody that's going to hopefully bring fresh ideas and new energy and revitalize your team. If we're working with those people, then, you know, we extend an invite.

The other thing that I've done in the past I've done an all trades talk and what we've done is invited all of our trade partners to some general location and spent.

two to four hours with them, provided lunch and drinks and whatever else, find out what are we doing well as a construction company to make your lives easy and what are we not? And sometimes you don't get the feedback you want, but all feedback is good in my opinion. it's always worth listening.

I think what I'm hearing most or what I'm taking away from that is that you're not treating those relationships as transactional. You're really treating them as a valued member of your team. Well, don't they have to be, you know, I mean, I mean, at least that's how I look at it, you know, because who's going to come back and fix a problem?

on a project. The person who's transactional and is just, a cog in your wheel, Or the person who is a part, like more than just a cog, literally like a huge component of the machine. if people know that they are going to have an ongoing relationship with you,

chances are pretty good, they're going to prioritize coming to fix things for your clients, as opposed to people that are treated as one-offs. that's why I choose not to call them sub traits. You know, like as a company, we made the conscious decision two or three years ago to avoid, I mean, it still slips out from now.

every now and then, because it's part of the business and whatnot. But we call them our trade partners. And we look at it like that. They are our partners. We cannot complete our projects without our partners. And I think that's clearly a pillar of your success as well, whether they're an employee or a partner treating those people well.

has a ripple effect in terms of not only making them happy and keeping them around, but they are extending that to your clients. Yep. it's accountability. And, you know, I think a lot of people don't like it.

I work really hard to hold everybody that I work with accountable all the time. accountable doesn't mean that you're criticizing, you're being critical of something. Accountable means being accountable. So if somebody does something great, hold them accountable for having done something great.

You know, conversely, of course, if somebody doesn't do something that you're particularly happy with, hold them accountable because if people just think it's always going to be a free pass, they're not going to really feel fulfilled in what they do.

Absolutely. I'm thinking about a couple scenarios in my own business where I probably could have done a better job of that.

So think we all can. thinking through, the incredible

growth that you've seen since you started in how you run a really organized construction company. Any last words of wisdom for contractors who are struggling in running their businesses right now?

It's been my experience in this industry that if you reach out and ask for help, I have yet to find somebody that's told me to go away. You know, I've never done that to anybody and I never would. You know, am I going to prioritize taking a phone call from another builder over a client meeting? No, I'm not. Facts.

but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to call them back and answer whatever questions they do or don't have and, share things that have worked well for my business over the years and also share things that haven't worked well. So I would say, don't be afraid to reach out to people from near and far and, ask for help and ask for advice and, know, charge out rates.

overhead and market rates. Why are we all trying to race to the bottom? That's work together and that's when jobs based off of ability and skill and not try to win jobs because we're the cheapest.

Preach. Preach on. You got it. So with that in mind, Erik, I know our listeners are definitely want to going to want to learn more about you and connect. So what's the best way for someone to reach out? Yeah, if you want to get a hold of me, you can contact me through our website sprucehill.ca

That's S P R U C E H I L L . CA, or you can find me on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, you can find me on all of those platforms. I think they're all either Spruce Hill contracting or Spruce Hill is the tag name for those different platforms. So feel free to reach out and then, you know,

I will honor what I just finished saying in terms of if you reach out, I will get back to you. If you expect me to get back to you within a couple of minutes or even potentially a couple of days, then your expectations will not get met, but I will get back to you. I promise. Amazing. And we'll put all those links in the show notes for anyone listening. You can check it out at beyond the tools podcast.com connect with Erik and

Always a pleasure, Erik. Thank you so much for sharing with us today. Thank you for having me.