How to Choose a Construction ERP System: Why the “Why” Matters More Than the “What”
Choosing a construction ERP system is usually treated by most project managers and owners as finding better software. On this episode of Construction Hot Takes, Greg Gorman, Jeff Robertson, and Adam Cooper flip that around: the software choice is secondary. The real question is whether the underlying problem (messy WIP reporting, disconnected systems, missing functionality, or a private-equity owner wanting every entity on one platform) is real and painful enough to justify the disruption.
Greg walks through what happens when companies skip that step: a client who went live on a new ERP after a year, only to admit they were using 30% of it two years in. Adam shares the flip side: a $20 million general contractor on QuickBooks Desktop for 20 years who almost switched ERPs for the wrong reason, until Ascent showed him he only needed to build out Procore Financials, not replace his accounting system at all.
Jeff makes the case that understanding how your business actually runs today, before you shop, is non-negotiable, and that duplicate data entry is one of the clearest signals something is broken, since every extra time a number gets keyed in doubles the chance of human error.
The conversation closes on why a single, fully-integrated ERP is a myth. Adam and Jeff agree that in practice, almost every construction company ends up choosing a primary ERP as the source of truth for financial data, then integrating at least one best-of-breed tool for the functions the ERP handles weakly.
Watch the Episode
In This Episode
Why defining the “why” before the “what” prevents the most expensive ERP mistakes
The real triggers that push construction companies to change ERPs: reporting, integration, functionality, and PE consistency
Why a $20M general contractor on 20-year-old QuickBooks Desktop was talked out of switching
How duplicate data entry multiplies human error across a construction business
Why the ERP should be the single source of truth, even when other systems plug into it
Episode Chapters
0:08 — What an ERP actually is and why it touches nearly everything
2:35 — Why “the why” has to come before “the what”
17:33 — Why the ERP should be your source of truth for financial data
21:13 — Best-in-class vs. best-of-breed: the unicorn system myth
Notable Quotes
“See if you can persuade me, your team, or maybe even yourself into going through all that work.”
— Greg Gorman, 10:27
“I absolutely think the why is more important than the what.”
— Jeff Robertson, 5:20
“ERPs are meant to be the source of truth for financial data. Everything after that is a luxury.”
— Adam Cooper, 18:12
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do construction companies decide to switch to a new construction ERP system?
The most common triggers are reporting gaps, like not being able to produce a clean WIP report without pulling data from multiple places, disconnected tools that don’t talk to each other, a current system that’s outgrown the business, and private-equity-backed owners wanting every entity on one consistent platform.
Should I define the why or the what first when evaluating a new ERP?
Define the why first. Choosing a specific ERP before clearly defining the business problem almost always leads to regret, because you learn things about your own processes mid-implementation that would have changed your pick.
Is QuickBooks enough for a construction company, or do I need a full ERP?
Not always. A $20 million commercial general contractor on QuickBooks Desktop for 20 years was pushed toward a new ERP mainly because of a separate Procore Financials decision. The better fit was keeping QuickBooks and building out Procore, avoiding a costly system change with no compelling why.
How many software systems should a construction company run before consolidating into one ERP?
There’s no universal number. Some companies run 15 to 20 pieces of software and genuinely need each one. The better test is whether the ERP remains the source of truth for financial, vendor, customer, and employee data, with everything else feeding into or drawing from it.
What questions should I ask before choosing a new ERP?
Start by mapping how your business runs today, not how you think it should run. Then check for duplicate data entry, since every extra time a number gets keyed in doubles the chance of human error, and confirm whether disconnected systems are actually causing real problems.
Does a single, fully integrated ERP exist for construction companies?
No true all-in-one system exists. Most construction companies land somewhere in between, choosing a primary ERP for core accounting and integrating a best-of-breed third-party tool, like a purchasing platform, for the functions the ERP handles weakly.
About the Hosts
Adam Cooper: President & CEO of Ascent Consulting. Adam is the primary host of Construction Hot Takes and works directly with construction company owners on operations, growth, and leadership systems. Jeff Robertson: Vice President at Ascent Consulting. Jeff focuses on AI and technology adoption, ERP execution, and the operating detail behind fractional COO engagements with construction companies. Gregory Gorman: Principal Senior Consultant at Ascent Consulting. Greg specializes in construction accounting, WIP reporting, and the financial reporting layer that ERP decisions are ultimately built around.
Not Sure If You Actually Need a New ERP?
Most construction companies pick a new system before they’ve defined the problem it’s supposed to solve, and pay for that mistake for years. With a 30 minute consultation from Ascent Consulting, we’ll help you get clear on the why before you shop for the what. Book a Free Consultation
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Episode Transcript
[0:08] Greg: Welcome.
[0:10] Greg: To the Construction Hot Takes podcast. We are going to have an interesting conversation today about something that has really permeated almost every day that I’ve been in the ascent for the last four years. And it might not be the sexiest thing, but is really important. And that is going to be a new ERP. Well, ERPs in general, but you know, our topic for today, our theme is going to be why do people get ERPs.
[0:35] Greg: Why do they change. Why do they go through what we all probably can agree is a very stressful, usually very expensive process. And we’ve talked about ERPs before. And for anyone who doesn’t know, right. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Program. And that is the system by which you really run your business. It’s, you know, it’s your accounting system. It’s your it’s your sort of what happens of the brains, of the brains of the the software of your business.
[1:04] Jeff: Right. It could have project management.
[1:05] Greg: It could have project management. It can have some CRM in it. It can have health and human—
[1:09] Adam: It can have payroll. Jeff: Human resources.
[1:11] Greg: …Resources. But it’s your whole system. And generally systems are packaged to where they do, you know, more than one thing, right? So this this started in a conversation that I had here internally with someone. And I said, it’s funny, I have a really big client, $1 billion client. Well, they’re almost a billion, about $900 million. And they just went live in a new ERP after a year.
[1:32] Greg: I’m not going to say which one because we all have differing opinions on it, but it’s a good system and they like it. But they’ve been live a year. It took them a year to go live and they’ve been live for a year. And they admitted to me on what during the last on-site, that they might be using 30% of it.
[1:47] Greg: So that’s two years of their lives, right, of their corporate lives and two years of all the pain and suffering that comes with it, and two years of a lot of money paid for for something they’re just using 30% of. So that kind of got us started on the conversation. So I thought that I would ask you a few questions because you’re both you know, we’ve all worked on an ERP project, but there’s some there’s a big one kind of going on right now that we’re talking about a lot of dissent.
[2:13] Greg: And we wanted to just talk about some of the things that you guys are hearing about. Why do people feel the need to go into a new ERP, and what are some of the sort of things that you would like people to know about going into a new ERP, or almost like questions you want people to think about?
[2:35] Jeff: I’ll start with the things I typically hear for the why? Greg: Yeah, yeah.
[2:39] Greg: I think the why is important.
[2:41] Jeff: So the why, a couple of examples. Reporting is one we hear a lot. I cannot—I want—I want a rip—a WIP report. Let’s just use, you know, that’s the—the holy grail. I want a WIP report. I can’t right now. I’m doing it in Excel and I’m pulling it from multiple places. Reporting is a big one. They—they just, maybe they’re using QuickBooks now, for example.
[3:02] Greg: So reporting out of the system.
[3:06] Jeff: Yes. Reporting out of the system.
[3:08] Greg: Yeah.
[3:09] Jeff: Another one is lack of integration.
[3:11] Jeff: Adam and I had a conversation about tech stack earlier. Maybe it’s a tech stack question of we have a large stack of things and they’re not integrated. Well, we move to an ERP, it has those things, you know, the five things I want are native inside the system. So I don’t have all these APIs and different integrations.
[3:37] Jeff: and I’m afraid they’re not talking to each other in the right way. And I’ve got all these workaround processes to make it work. I can get them in one big package. That’s another one I hear quite a bit.
[3:46] Greg: So a connected system?
[3:47] Jeff: Sure, yeah.
[3:53] Adam: The other one I hear is, our current system just doesn’t offer the functionality that we need. We’re doing a lot of things manually, and we want a system that has that functionality built in. We don’t want to go out and buy more software to bolt on to say, QuickBooks. We want just one system that does everything.
[4:14] Greg: Yeah, what works at 5 million won’t work at 50 million. What works at 50 million won’t work at 500 million.
[4:19] Adam: Or. The other reason is—the other one that we hear a lot of is we work with private equity-backed companies, and they buy multiple entities. They buy a bunch of companies. They want them all in the same system. So they’re looking for consistency across the platform.
[4:40] Greg: Those are all, all—all of those are ones that I would have said. So I think we’re on the right track. I wanted to frame it for you guys this way. This is what I wrote down here. Should the why come before the what? And what that means is, should the why of why you need a new system, being able to determine the things you just said, being able to make that—make that determination that those things are real, that you need those things, or those are real problems to solve. What you buy is sort of secondary to that.
[5:10] Greg: What you buy is—it’s a separate decision, right, which system you go into. But I’m wondering if you guys think that the why is more important than the what.
[5:20] Jeff: I absolutely think the why is more important than the what, especially because, well, I could frame it this way, doing it in reverse
[5:33] Jeff: is—I got to get my mind around how to explain this. Picking a software, whichever one you want to pick before you—there was probably a, you know, I want something better, whatever that means to you. I want something different, whatever that means to you. And then choosing—choosing the particular solution before you’ve defined the—really defined the problem exactly is going to be extremely painful.
[6:00] Jeff: You’ll probably end up—you’re going to learn—you won’t probably, you will learn things along the way. Yeah, you absolutely will. You will learn things about your business and the process by which you—you operate your business that you may not have been fully aware of before, and realize this might—this solution I chose first might not have been the best one.
[6:22] Greg: Yeah.
[6:22] Jeff: And then you’re already—you’re already—you’ve sunk a bunch of investment. You’ve invested a lot of time and money in it. You might be too far down the road.
[6:29] Greg: Yeah, I think—I think it’s helpful for people to know that we don’t,
[6:34] Greg: As someone comes to us and we take a sales call and they say, “I want to change ERPs,” one of the things I like to say is, you know, “Why? Talk—talk me through the why.” I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m not trying to dissuade you. I’m not trying to not take on, you know, a new client. What—what we’re trying to do is make sure that the why makes sense.
[6:58] Adam: Well, I had a conversation with a new client a few weeks ago. They just became a new client, but as part of the sales process, they were talking about potentially changing accounting systems, getting an ERP. They’re on QuickBooks Desktop. They’ve been on QuickBooks Desktop for 20 years. And he was saying, “You know, we were doing this, we’ve done that,
[7:21] Adam: We’re thinking about getting a new accounting system, thinking about getting a new ERP.” And I said, “Why? Why are you—why are you thinking about that?” And the reasons he gave me were valid, but they weren’t persuasive. Right. And—and—and I said, “You know, I have no skin in the game, but if I were you, I wouldn’t change.”
[7:48] Adam: Yeah. I said, “You know, how— how big are you?” They’re doing 20 million. They’re a commercial general contractor. Okay. “How much bigger are you thinking you’re going to get?” “We’re not going to get that much bigger. Maybe—maybe 25, maybe 30. We don’t want to get much bigger. We’re very comfortable here, very comfortable at this level for years.”
[8:09] Adam: You know, “What would you like?” “Well, you know, I’d like more financial visibility. I’d like some better reports, that kind of stuff.” “Okay. Is that it?” You know, these are not compelling reasons to go through the pain of changing accounting systems and getting something more complicated. QuickBooks is sufficient for plenty of businesses, and—and you don’t need to make things more complex for the sake of being complex.
[8:35] Adam: And—and he had another platform. He has Procore, and he was going to get Procore Financials. And he said, “If we’re going to get Procore Financials, maybe we should change accounting systems, too.” I said, “If you get Procore Financials, you don’t need to change accounting systems. We can make it work with QuickBooks and save you a lot of time
[8:52] Adam: and, you know, pain of—of a change, and we can get you the reports you want out of Procore Financials without changing accounting systems.” So that was like music to his ears. He’s like, “Oh, so I only have to do one thing instead of two things.” Yeah. And—and, “Let’s—let me show you what that looks like.
[9:10] Adam: And let’s kind of walk through that.” And ultimately, you know, that was compelling enough for him to say, “Okay, like, why don’t I bring you guys on board? You help me build out this Procore side of things, and I’ll save all that time, money, and energy on not changing—by not changing accounting systems.”
[9:27] Jeff: Yeah. You know, putting the what before the why, I just realized we actually—this actually—we get this a lot of times. I’ll take a—I’ll take a call, and someone will ask me just point-blank, “Which is the best one? We’re going to change ERPs,” before they give me the why. It’s like—
[9:43] Greg: It’s already been decided.
[9:44] Jeff: “Which is the best one?” And I’m like, “Well, that’s a trick question.” And I take them back to the, “Why are you changing in the first place? Why do you think you need to change? I don’t care why you—I mean, I get that you’re, you know, the players, you know, you just want to know which of the five is the best one.”
[10:01] Greg: Yeah, that’s a good point. I get that question too. “Which one would you recommend?”
[10:06] Jeff: Right.
[10:07] Greg: “What have you heard about…?” And then they named something that to me is exactly why I think this is helpful to people. Start with the—start with the why, not with the what. And see if those—I, you know, I like your word. See if you can persuade me, your team, or maybe even yourself into going through all that work.
[10:27] Greg: Right? Because if you don’t do that, we’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it. The decision has been made. And then you have, like with my client, you have two years of uncertainty. We had a client, one of my first jobs here, we had a client—we went into that client on day one, and they were a huge company up in the—up in the Northeast.
[10:46] Greg: And they—they lost their financial visibility for six months. They had absolutely no financial reporting because they picked a system without asking the why. Jeff: Right. Greg: And we see that or versions of that
[11:01] Adam: all the time. And they didn’t do a very good job with the what, either.
[11:03] Greg: Well, the what was different.
[11:05] Adam: They didn’t do a very good evaluation or selection process. They basically listened to the salespeople.
[11:09] Greg: They listen to their salespeople. Which is why I think what happens if you start with the what, not with the why.
[11:14] Jeff: Well, I think there’s some—
[11:16] Adam: Just because they had a great booth at the trade show, or—
[11:19] Greg: they told you everything you wanted to hear on a sales call. Well, yeah.
[11:22] Adam: Theirs was the prettiest interface, or it’s the most well-known name. We’ve heard that one before.
[11:28] Greg: Branding matters to people.
[11:29] Adam: Yeah. It’s like, but it was not the right system for them. I mean, that’s—that’s the software marketing company’s fault. They did a great job.
[11:40] Greg: Yeah, so Jeff and I, we’re—we’re about to go to a big national conference.
[11:45] Adam: The CFMA conference. So we’re going—by the way, if you go to the CFMA conference, you might have seen them there because this will probably come out afterwards.
[11:51] Jeff: Probably.
[11:52] Greg: We hope—we hope that we met you. It’s a great conference.
[11:55] Adam: It was nice to have met you.
[11:57] Greg: The Construction Financial Management Association. It’s a great conference, but it’s a great conference for lots of reasons. But they’ve got a really—a really robust exhibit hall. And a lot of the big ERP players come. And one of the things that I’m intending to do next week is—I love those conferences for those—Yeah, I’m intending to walk through that hall and ask people, “Why should someone choose you?”
[12:19] Jeff: Yeah. Greg: Instead of, “Tell me everything you can do,” because that’s the question that everybody asks, right? Well, yeah.
[12:26] Jeff: Well, “Can you what…?”
[12:27] Greg: “What are the bells and whistles…?”
[12:28] Jeff: “What’s your new—what’s your new thing you can do?”
[12:30] Greg: Yeah.
[12:31] Jeff: “We got AI.” That’s what they’re going to tell us.
[12:34] Greg: Would it make sense to you guys to walk through that exhibit hall and ask someone, “Why do you tell people they should switch to you?” It just occurred to me now, but that’s—that’s something that I’m going to try.
[12:44] Jeff: I like that. That’s a good one. We can—we’ll—we’ll—we’ll deploy across the floor.
[12:49] Adam: And, “What’s different between you and your top three competitors?” Jeff: Yeah.
[12:54] Greg: Because all of our clients have different reasons for going—for wanting to change. And you guys named some of them. But are they persuasive and compelling to go through the hassle? If the answer is yes, I think we would—
[13:07] Adam: Hassle is a very light way of putting—Yeah.
[13:10] Greg: It’s—it’s chaos. Some people describe it as—I don’t personally think it’s the worst thing that you ever have to go through at work. Some people think it is. I think—
[13:18] Adam: I—
[13:18] Greg: think it—
[13:19] Adam: think it is one of the most challenging, difficult things you’ll ever do as a business owner is change accounting systems.
[13:23] Jeff: Well, very few people have done it more than once, right? Accountants, because maybe they worked at a couple of different companies, it’s happened. Yeah, we’ve gone through a couple of them with our clients, but that’s kind of what we’re in the business—
[13:34] Adam: I’ve done like 20 of them. Yeah, there they go. Between painful and god-awful miserable, and you—you judge their success by how few people quit.
[13:44] Greg: Oh, we’ve all—we have horror stories. We could do a podcast episode on the horror stories of changing, right? But we don’t want to scare people. What we want to do is offer some advice about what are some of the things you would suggest that people, you know, each of you. What are some of the things that you would suggest people ask about the why? What are some of the whys?
[14:05] Jeff: So, I would start with—I don’t know if it’s the very first thing, but the first thing I think of is understanding your business processes that are today. Greg:Yeah. Jeff: Doesn’t—it doesn’t mean you’ve done any analysis, maybe you have ideas of, “This is just inefficient,” or whatever. Maybe you do, but set that aside. Just how do you do things today?
[14:24] Jeff: Because part of the analysis of you’re going to look at two, three, four, five different potential options. Part of that is how—how different and how the same is this to the way I think about things right now? Chances are pretty good you are going to change some things, the way you do things today, and let’s just assume that’s for the good.
[14:42] Jeff: It should always be for the good. It may not always feel that way to you, but you are going to—it is going to affect your process. So I think understanding how you do things today is a good first step.
[14:52] Greg: One of the things that we’ve all, I think we’ve all three come across—I know I have—is when someone goes into a new system and then they want to do everything exactly the way they used to do it.
[15:00] Jeff: It happens all the time.
[15:01] Greg: Because they are more comfortable doing it the way they, you know, they know it.
[15:06] Jeff: I’m—I’m convinced that that’s the subconscious. That’s not even conscious sometimes.
[15:10] Greg: So, I think that’s a great—I think that’s a good—it’s a good question to start with. When you want to ask why it’s, you know, how are you doing everything? Why are you doing it that way? Are you open to changing doing it that way? Do you have to do it for a certain reason because of the way you run your business, all that stuff?
[15:30] Greg: What about some of the dual-entry stuff? Because I think—I think that you brought up kind of there’s a manual aspect to what we do in construction a lot of times. Kind of what are some of the framing that people should ask about whether they’re overly manual or—or are they manual? Are they just right—a manual?
[15:49] Greg: Is there any such thing?
[15:51] Jeff: I would say—well, I’ll put it this way, I had a mentor of mine years ago. It was an architect, and I’ve carried this with me. Gosh, it’s been—well, it’s been 20-plus years that I was on a project, and we were redlining the drawings. We were—we were heavily involved in the project, and I—I wanted to move a detail.
[16:15] Jeff: I wanted to take this detail and put it over there also. And he says, “I’m not going to duplicate it. I’ll just move it. You tell me where you want it, I’ll put it there.” I mean, the detail exists, but, “I’m not going to duplicate it.” And I said, “Well, but the electrician is not going to look here.
[16:28] Jeff: He’s going to look there.” He’s like, “Fine, I’ll move it there.” He said, “Yeah, but…” He said, “Listen, if I do something twice, I’ve literally doubled my chances of screwing it up.” So anytime you have more than—more than one time to enter data, you’re entering a myriad of ways to screw up—human error, just playing a—fat-fingering something, transposing a number, someone not doing it because they didn’t know it was their job.
[16:53] Jeff: There’s—there’s too many reasons when you have to enter something twice. Because back to a conversation we had earlier about data and whether you trust it or not, if it’s any good part of that process. But I find that anytime you have—you have to enter something twice, it’s like rabbits. You end up then entering it three and four and five times,
[17:12] Greg: : Right Jeff: Because, “I have a log to check your log, and then you have a log to check his,” because that’s just the way the flow works and, “I don’t—It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I need to make sure that I’m keeping track of everything that you’re keeping track of.” We see that a lot. Yeah. So once you start entering something twice, you’re going to enter it four or five times, guaranteed.
[17:30] Jeff: So I think that would be a—that would be a place I would look right away.
[17:33] Greg: Yeah. And then the last one I was going to bring up is sort of we talked about it earlier, the whole disconnected systems. I mean, how many systems is too many? Is it realistic that you can get five or six different systems into one system? Is that—is that logical, and is it worth it to maybe bring six down to two or, you know…
[17:55] Adam: I mean, that’s kind of a judgment call, yeah, for the company. We work with companies that have 15 or 20 different pieces of software, and they need all of them, or they want all of them, or they found a use case for all of them.
[18:12] Adam: ERPs are meant to be—
[18:17] Adam: ERPs are meant to be the source of truth for financial data. As a—first and foremost, that is their—
[18:24] Greg: why they exist.
[18:25] Adam: That’s their primary purpose—source of truth for financial data. Everything after that is a luxury, right? So, inventory systems, payroll systems, project management systems, reporting systems,
[18:41] Greg: procurement.
[18:42] Adam: Procurement.
[18:43] Greg: The list goes on, CRM.
[18:44] Adam: Right. Those are all add-ons to the core functionality of which is accounting. It’s—it’s—it’s that.
[18:52] Jeff: Some of those things you listed are more complementary of one another than some others. For instance, CRM versus core accounting and inventory, those two things are pretty—should be pretty darn tied together.
[19:05] Adam: Sure, but CRM is also eventually, hopefully, your customer database. That’s true. So those tie together. Good point. Your vendor database should be in there because that’s where your commitments are. Even if you’re using a purchasing platform, you need to have a common vendor database. So it’s the source of truth for the customer data, for the vendor data, for the employee data.
[19:25] Adam: So that’s the payroll system. It also could be where it tracks PTO. PTO can be tracked somewhere else. But the actual payroll data, the financial data of the payroll system needs to be in the ERP. And then as you create purchase orders and subcontracts, those commitments need to flow into the ERP if they don’t originate in there, right? That also becomes your accounts payable process, your accounts receivable process, your project accounting, as well as your corporate accounting—your books.
[19:52] Adam: So that’s the core of the system. Now you can have other systems that feed into this or draw out of it. Like, for example, if you use—I’ll just use—drop some names. If you use Kojo for purchasing, the vendor database in Kojo should come from the accounting system. If you use Procore, the vendor database and the customer database should come from the accounting system so that they are the same, they are matched.
[20:16] Adam: Your employee data should come from the payroll system or be fed from the accounting system to the payroll system so everybody gets paid. And then that data needs to flow out to the project management or accounting system or whatever it is. But you see how the ERP kind of sits at the center of everything, and that’s the goal of it.
[20:34] Jeff: : Yeah. Adam: Now can you get CRM or ERP that have integrated inventory, integrated payroll? Sure. They all should be able to do purchasing, AP, AR, subcontracts. They all embedded in that tool. Now, you could outsource them to a secondary tool that interfaces. But, you know, you talk about how many systems is too many. I don’t know that there’s any—there’s no one answer for that.
[21:02] Jeff: Everybody starts out wanting a completely native system where everything is in the one basket. Nothing just does, and it doesn’t exist. That’s the point. It does what?
[21:16] Greg: I think there is one. I think as much—that’s maybe like a question for an exhibit hall. Why do you go around telling everyone that you’re everything? Because you don’t do this, you don’t. And by the way, those things that do that you do do, they don’t really work well together, or one’s not very robust, one’s, you know… There’s a million, which is—I think we’re all back to the
[21:36] Greg: why, right? Why do you want the new system? And then, are you solving a problem in your business?
[21:40] Jeff: Well, I can say I know this has happened way more than once—more—more than twice. The first is, “I want a completely integrated system.” Okay, great. Everybody says that. Fine. “Why do you want that?” etc. And then we start looking at the tool. We do the why. Let’s look at the functions. How do you do things today?
[22:00] Jeff: What is your—what is your use case and your best case for each of those functions? And then they find out, well, this ERP does what I want it to do, but I don’t like how it does it. It does like five of the ten things I want. This one does the other five well, and the other… So you end up going—but I’ll just use the Kojo thing you used as an example. But, and that Kojo thing over there does it exactly the way I like it. “Can we integrate that?” “Yes, you can.”
[22:27] Adam: So this is the best-in-class versus best-of-breed.
[22:30] Jeff: We end—Yeah, we end up—I actually—I could say 100% of the time, we’ve always ended up with somewhere in between of choosing a third party in some way or another.
[22:41] Greg: Well, I think it’s a—it’s a broad question that we tried to tackle today about what to do when you start thinking about a new ERP. And I think at some point in every business, one of us said it, at some point in every construction business there—there is a moment when you decide, “Do I need a new—do I need a better system?
[23:02] Greg: Do I need a more robust system? Do I need better, you know, better visibility? Do I need more integration?” So I think it’s something that people are interested in. I think it’s a—it’s a good question to think about, but I’d like to leave people with the framing for what to do when they think that.
[23:19] Adam: Yeah, I mean, you—you said it really well in the beginning, and Simon Sinek wrote a book about it, which is, “Start with Why.” Start with the why. Why do you think you need this? Or, what are you trying to accomplish? What’s the—what’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? What’s the output you need? What are the reports you need?
[23:37] Adam: What’s the functionality you’re looking to have? Start with that. Then go look for the systems that can—that can deliver on what you want. But start with that first. Don’t—don’t pick the system first and then try and fit into the system. That’s what’s—that phrase? That’s the tail wagging the dog.
[23:54] Jeff: Yeah, hits a lot. Yep.
[23:55] Greg: The why comes before the what. Well, that’s a great way to—I think, for us to end off today. Thank you for listening and watching. Please—please like and subscribe us in the future and get us where you can find your podcasts. And we look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for joining.
