241 The Value of Data Management - Kyle Lintala Oct 30 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are pleased today to have joining us Kyle Lintala. Kyle is the head of product at BILT Solutions. Welcome, Kyle. Thanks for joining us today.

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me on.

Greg Bray: Well, let's start off and just help people get to know a little bit about you. Give us that quick background overview about yourself.

Kyle Lintala: Yes. So, I am with BILT Solutions. Been with BILT since the inception, went live with the platform [00:01:00] about 2 years ago. I worked for a home builder for around 7 years in Michigan. I currently live in Michigan, originally from Ohio. A little bit about my background, I grew up in construction, and then right out of school, went out into the field building houses, framing houses. We were kind of like a one-stop shop for most things, mostly everything.

And then eventually transitioned to a home builder. And then with that home builder went into the estimating and purchasing department. And at that same time, I was going back to school to get an MBA in quantitative analysis, which then kind of led to my path of being all things, not all things, but a lot of things, data and technology for home builders specifically.

Kevin Weitzel: All right. So, before I get into my next question, I have to know because I'm originally from Michigan too. So, are you a Wolverine, a Spartan, a Bronco, which is Western Michigan, so just for the listeners that don't know WMU Bronco, or a pot leaf? Because you did say you're originally from [00:02:00] Ohio. I don't remember what they call them there. They look like pot leafs. They're a Buckeye, Buckeye. Or are you a Buckeye?

Kyle Lintala: Right. Right.

Kevin Weitzel: What is your Alma mater?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah. So, I actually went to school in Minneapolis, a small private school in Minneapolis. I don't even know what our mascot was. It was North Central University.

Kevin Weitzel: That's a good thing to not know because that means that you were in academia, not sports. That was more just me being silly. I like any chance I get to pick on the pot leafs. But anyway. So, we're at the point of our show where before we get into what you do at BILT and what you are bringing to the table for our listeners, we need to know something about you personally that has nothing to do with the home building industry, work, family, just something about you that is Interesting. What do we got?

Kyle Lintala: Oh, I don't know about interesting. I know one thing that I didn't stumble upon until I've gotten to adult life was classic literature and reading classic literature. And I think part of that is because I'm analytical, so all of that is overanalyzed [00:03:00] and you get, like, a blend of new experiences through reading and then being able to overanalyze things and look at things. So, not really an interesting tidbit, but it is something that like, I don't think really anyone knows about me.

Kevin Weitzel: Now, are we talking about oddball stuff like De Quincey's essays, or are we talking about more universally classic like Iliad and the Odyssey?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, more of like the typical stuff like Tennyson, Jane Austen. I guess a lot of early 1800s are probably my favorite era of stuff. No reason why. I couldn't explain to you why I gravitated there, but that's kind of where I'm at.

Kevin Weitzel: I dig it.

Greg Bray: Kevin, you continue to surprise me with the little nuggets you pull out.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, this is something Greg does not know about me that our listeners are going to learn another little tidbit about Kevin. I have an antique book collection that is roughly about six hundred books that date anywhere from about 1740 I think is the oldest copyright date that I have all the way up to uh, oh about the early teens of the 1900s. I actually donated all of the medical books that [00:04:00] my mother's adopted father had. He was I guess my adopted grandfather. I donated all the medical books to the Rosson House here in Arizona, so they could have a display of medical books in their museum.

Greg Bray: I did not know that Kevin.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm practically illiterate. I'm a skim reader, Kyle. CliffNotes are too involved for me. I just need the highlights. Give them to me. Bust them out. I'm done. You know.

Kyle Lintala: Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I'm similar in that I'll read, I'll analyze, I'll dissect, and then I'll forget. So, you know, come back to something 2 years later.

Kevin Weitzel: It's practically the same thing. Right?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah. Start over.

Kevin Weitzel: All right. So, home building.

Greg Bray: Kyle help us understand when that moment was that you said I don't want to swing a hammer anymore but I still want to be in this industry.

Kyle Lintala: Oh, yeah, that is a good question. So, I like being hands-on. I just saw an opportunity for inefficiencies to be addressed at a level that they weren't being addressed. So, it happened to work out that my gut instinct was correct and like, okay, let's [00:05:00] see if I can pivot go this direction and help out and bring in this area that I'm interested into home building. So, yeah, I got lucky in that I was able to spot that and my intuition was there. So, not a direct path, but, yeah, that's how I stumbled into that.

Greg Bray: Tell us a little bit more about BILT Solutions. What is it that you guys are offering and what's the service that's available?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah. So, we do many things data reporting and analytics for home builders, specifically right now, just MarkSystems, ERP system, home builders on that platform, although we have had requests to integrate with other ERPs, but for now, just focusing on MarkSystems and those builders there.

But what we do is we take, you know, their ERP operations data, give them good insights, eliminate redundancy. So, people are going to Excel, copying things, looking things up from the system, pulling them out, dumping them into miscellaneous spreadsheets all around. So, our main offering is just automating all of that. You know, the data is there. It's in [00:06:00] one spot. Let's make sure we get it right in that one spot and then we can automate the consumption of that data. That's one of the big things that we do.

And then, we end up being like a one-stop shop for reporting. So, then we're pulling in Google Analytics, we're pulling in your CRM data, pulling in economic data, we're pulling in data from other sources as well. So, then no matter what your business function is, you can have all the data you need in one spot.

So, you don't have to join the executive team. You don't necessarily have to log into something like Lasso to see your last of data, you don't have to wait for that last sort of report to come to you monthly. If you're interested, if it comes up in a meeting and go right in the computer, go to our platform, see your Lasso data, see how that interacts with data from your other platforms.

Kevin Weitzel: So, question for you. There's no secret that one of the largest ERP operators out there. I'm not going to mention their name, but one of the largest ones out there adopted by many, many, many homebuilders across the country does not allow any API integration, does not allow that data to live outside of their little chasm of information. How do you [00:07:00] handle clients that have chosen to put their eggs in that basket and still be able to get around that to be able to utilize that data for multiple uses?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, I think that would be extremely difficult to do. But I think if there is a way to export critical data, and you could kind of automate it as long as you're getting those exports in. People still need their ad hoc analysis. So, by all means, use Excel. Excel is great. I'm definitely not going to ding on Excel, even though a lot of people have things siloed in Excel. But, when it's used correctly, Excel is phenomenal.

What you could do to try to centralize some of that is take critical data, export it, and just have someone own it and keep it in one spot and then use that exported data as you're like central hub to pull that data from. Because once it's in CSV or file anywhere outside of the system, we could read it. Some manual step has to happen to extract it out, then once we get it, we're [00:08:00] good.

Greg Bray: So Kyle, before we dive in a little deeper into what some of this data is useful for, take us back a step into when you guys were starting to put the solution together. What was it that you were hitting your head on the wall going there's gotta be a better way, there's gotta be a better way? We should build a better way. What was that challenge that you were facing and trying to solve?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, I think it came from the time it took to get answers to basic questions. It was a lot of hunting and repetitive searching for things. And then it was like, okay, we're going to this spreadsheet, and the numbers like kind of off from this other spreadsheet. Like, two different people are managing those these should tie out and be the same thing. So yeah, it was a blend of one, accuracy, and two, just efficiency of getting data and then getting it deployed and distributed.

You know, if you are siloed in Excel, that's one thing that can be tricky is deploying what analytics people should look at. You're going to wait for that email to come in to be able to see the updated analytic sheet. Most of the time people are probably keeping their own [00:09:00] analytic sheet of sort in that realm. So like, does that tie out to everyone else's? Are we talking the same thing come meeting time, or do we have to wait for that report to come to us? So yeah, I think it was a blend of efficiencies and accuracy.

Greg Bray: So then, as you now are trying to create this central hub for all this various data, what are some of those questions that people are trying to answer or should be considering? I guess another way to look at that is what is the data they should be watching and paying attention to, to help their business.

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, I think, biggest ROI right off the bat for our platform is construction costs variance in that realm. I guess it could be applied to just variance in general, even variance from, budget. If you're talking sales and marketing, your sales marketing budget and the allocations there, like, what your variants are, how you're tracking there.

Again, it's that not waiting for, like, the monthly report to see where you're at. It's like you can go in real time, see how you're tracking. Yeah, and then in the construction realm, you can dive into, like, the reasons why things are happening, like, the cost [00:10:00] categories, you know, the cost codes, descriptions of things, and see if you can make sense of areas where you're losing dollars.

Greg Bray: Some of the systems that you mentioned you know, you mentioned MarkSystems is the ERP. You mentioned the CRM, you mentioned the website data. What are some of the things that can happen when you actually begin to connect these things together? Are there things you can learn that you cannot learn when they're all individually siloed or managed?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, I certainly think so. What we did a few months back was we started tapping into economic data. There you can start to see your trends in your organization against economics. It can be broad national economics, you can get local and start pulling some things there, and then you can see how you are performing to that. And then, yeah, you can use that to your you know advantage for strategy or at least to gauge your performance in the market in your local market, benchmarking without benchmarking.

Kevin Weitzel: So, you're talking like Doug Henning, David Copperfield magic here [00:11:00] where it's not about how you sell, it's about how you buy. It's about how you put the interconnected systems to create that profitability versus just hoping for profitability.

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, yeah. That's one way to look at it.

Greg Bray: You mean, hope's not a strategy, Kevin?

Kevin Weitzel: I'm surprised how often hope is a strategy, which is crazy. But, yes.

Greg Bray: Well, I think it's interesting, Kyle, you talk about layering in some of that more general analytic data because there is that question. It's like, gosh, traffic's down. Something's down. Why is it down? Is it just because we changed something? Is it because we're doing something different? Or is it because the Fed did something or this other global event just happened and everybody quit going to shop for homes for three weeks because they were all stuck to the news because of this other thing or whatever? How do we connect that in a way where we can be comfortable that we didn't just change or break something because of that new campaign we launched, but rather it's because of this other external factor?

Kyle Lintala: I think [00:12:00] that's where being able to start making sense of those things is where, like, our platform comes in handy. If you go to, like, your Google Analytics studio, and you're just focusing on your Google Analytics report, you're not necessarily at that moment in time, like, seeing what your other systems are doing, seeing, like, what the broad, you know, economic indicators, what they're saying as well.

So, being able to see, like, all that on a single screen or on, you know, an intuitive, like, interface, you can, like, click through and, like, drill down into things and see things, you can then answer those questions. Okay, traffic is down. Here are some of the things that could have caused that. Traffic is down and leads are up because X, Y, Z, as you can see in this visual, start to piecemeal those things together.

Greg Bray: As you look at pulling in website data, because most of our audience listening today is more on the sales and marketing team, and it may not be involved in some of the other parts of the business as much. Are there some things that can get set up upfront, like in a Google analytics scenario that would make this data even more helpful, some things that could be [00:13:00] tracked on the website that then as they pull through would help make some of these connections even more useful and easier to do?

Kyle Lintala: I think anything that would help you indicate a buyer's interest would be good to have. So, if you don't have like pages for your different products or different product types, I guess homebuilders if you're talking like floor plans, if you don't have a page for your floor plans or anything indicating any details about a floor plan, get those on your site. So, then we can see you know the traffic to those, like where are people clicking on the most.

Same for like location. When people are on your website, if you can't extract what location they're interested in or what floor plan they're interested in, then there's definitely, improvements to be made there as home builders. There's things like that.

And then, anything that would indicate how you as the builder could help a buyer in their journey. Do you need help with anything? What would that be? Whether it's like, navigating mortgages or whether it's like the logistics of moving, you know, beyond the actual, like, sale of it, how could a builder help? And then, you could start to see, like, [00:14:00] who your buyers are and learn more about your buyers without needing to actually get that lead in the system and then start dumping data on the lead and kind of get the step before start, you know, extracting some of those pieces out of there.

Greg Bray: Are you guys able to create some benchmarks at a larger client, beyond just an individual, but to be able to say, hey, across all of our, traffic and things that we're seeing across all of our clients, you know, there's this type of thing happening or this type of conversion rate level or this type of traffic increase, decrease that people can kind of compare themselves to?

Kyle Lintala: We're probably too small for that right now. But what we do, probably one of the advantages of being small is that we'll get, you know, someone make a request saying, hey, we're seeing, you know, this interaction or this going on with our data. We want to report to see it in, like, X, Y, Z manner. So, then we can go to our other clients and say, okay, they're experiencing that same thing. Maybe this solution will help them as well. We're kind of like the [00:15:00] brain trust, I don't know if that's the right word, but, you know, everyone's kind of like pitching into how we can make this platform better

Greg Bray: As you kind of consider the CRM side versus the website side versus some of the production side, are there things that you're able to pull out and show, even if it's just still in that self-contained like this is all data that's from Google Analytics, we're not mirroring it up to anything else, but we can still display it better, we can still help you mine it a little easier than you might just on your own.

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, yeah. Google Analytics you can replicate on our platform, anything you see on, you know, the Google Analytics platform or their application. You can toggle between the two or set it up however you would want to see. But then you're not limited to your users that can go on Google Analytics. You know, because you don't necessarily want your executive team to have to go on to Google Analytics whenever they want to see, like, an update on website data.

But yeah, we can mimic the reporting that you see in those. Most of the time we can be more flexible in how it is [00:16:00] displayed, so you can click and drill through. So, if you're talking CRM data, you can click through and click on a community. Like, let's say you're looking at a community, then from there, you can drill down into your web traffic on that community. You can drill down into like your sales or operations in that community. Like, what is your cycle time been in that community? Stuff like that.

Greg Bray: Now, I'm guessing, Kyle, that the people that you work with are folks that actually value their data because that's why they're coming to you. But I bet that you also have conversations with those that you're trying to invite to work with you who may be don't value their data quite as much or haven't quite figured out that this is even a thing they should be worried about. What are some of the things you hear out there as you are talking to builders that just kind of make you go, wow, you're really missing it? You know, you don't even know the opportunities that are out there to benefit from some of this information.

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, that's actually very hard, at least for me to articulate, like if we're on a sale call of [00:17:00] sorts. If you don't value your data, how do you get them to see that there is value in their data?

Kevin Weitzel: Kyle, do you think it's more that people, it's not that they do or don't necessarily value the data, because most people will value data when it's presented to them. However, do you think that it's that a lot of builders in our industry lack putting the items in place that can provide said data?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, I think that that's very true. And I think oftentimes it's more of like hindsight. Like, okay, we're starting to see the value in analytics, so now we want to see what trends we can get out of, you know, last 5 years of X data, like, where you weren't capturing it for the last 5 years. You weren't capturing it cleanly for the last 5 years. So, yeah, we do run into that quite a bit.

Greg Bray: How do you have conversations about keeping data clean? You mentioned capturing it cleanly. What does that mean to you and how do people need to consider that process so that their data is quote-unquote clean?

Kyle Lintala: The best way to, you know, articulate that is [00:18:00] just to show it. So, like, we can run free reports so people can see, but it's like, you pull their data as they're getting it into a system, and display it back to them. Like, oh, I know I had more than 5 sales in this community. It's like, well, technically, according to your ERP system, you did not. Sure, your spreadsheet says 8. There says six. So, both are more than five, but In the system, you actually have five.

Greg Bray: That seems like a pretty big one to be out of sync on. How many of these homes did we actually sell? That's a pretty big miss in my mind.

Kyle Lintala: I think, like, construction schedule is a big one. So, especially if you're doing like CRM stuff where you're like, you want to kick out, you know, a notification saying, oh, hey, this house has framed. You can expect to see this next. Well, if you don't get that framing activity log, that email is not going to go out. Do you have anyone actually auditing to see if that framing activity is log? You know, if you have like, reports on it, or even like, alerts or indicators on it. I'm saying I like, oh, hey, this job is gone 12 days past when it should have been framed like someone look into it. You're [00:19:00] going to miss out on those if you don't have some kind of controls in place to capture those things.

Greg Bray: I think that's a great example of using data to improve the customer experience. It's not just about scheduling, you know, who's supposed to show up next to do their job, but it's about keeping the customer informed, it's about making them excited about the progress that's happening, and keeping them engaged in all of that. And being able to do it in a relatively automated fashion without a lot of work, if you can trust that the data is getting logged properly. I mean, Kevin, what are some things you think would benefit, you know, from that type of data management?

Kevin Weitzel: With data at any time, you can always utilize it to reverse engineer processes. You can use it to improve delivery times. You can use it to improve communication between one department to another. Because sales can say, yeah, we need more houses to sell, you know, in X, Y, Z community, but if they don't realize that the ERP is telling them that [00:20:00] they're 3 weeks backlogged on just getting lumber deliveries, sure, they can find that out through the smoke signals within the company.

However, if they look right, the data charts that show them that on the delivery schedule, here's what this is, and it's going to affect the lead time of home build series, you know, one, two and three, they know that those homes aren't available. They don't even have to worry about whether they can sell those homes or not. I think communication and processes, you can improve all of it.

Anytime you can improve that communication and process, you improve one major component in life, and that component is called profitability. So, anytime you can improve the profitability that allows the company to have more money to utilize for better land acquisition, for researching and finding better talent, and for properly compensating that better talent. So there we go. Boom That's what that data gives me.

Kyle Lintala: Yep. Yep. Spot on. The speed of data retrieval is huge. People shouldn't be going around having to hunt down information. We can be proactive with our buyers in communicating with our buyers. The data is [00:21:00] there, and especially if you have, like, alert systems in place, and then you can really be proactive in what you're communicating to your buyers and when.

Greg Bray: Well, Kyle, this has been a great conversation to learn a little more about what's possible with some of this data. What's the biggest roadblocks that you see builders run into who want to see some of this data and connect it, but just keep getting stuck for some reason? What is it that gets in the way?

Kyle Lintala: I would think it is adoption and I don't want to say fear of adoption, but there are a lot of tech solutions out there and a lot of builders adopting different tech solutions. There are tech solutions that might not have the best buy-in. So, I think there's that, and will our employees actually use this thing type of deal? So, I think that's probably the biggest hurdle that we've seen.

In order to get value out of our platform most builders would need some form of like data transformation across their company or like data literacy. We help with that. Like, we'll coach up teams like on their data literacy. You don't [00:22:00] need it to get value out of our platform because we try to make it as intuitive as possible. That is a hurdle that I think the builders see.

Greg Bray: Definitely we all expect the technology to just solve the problems and there's a lot of work that goes into implementing various technologies, especially when you're connecting more than one together. So people expect Kyle shows up. He's like, oh, it's done right within a day and it's all ready to go. Right. Is that a reasonable expectation, Kyle?

Kyle Lintala: Easy peasy. It is not. I will say we do have a lot of like, really good cookie-cutter reports. So, if you're on, like, other systems that we're currently integrated with, you sign up, day one, as soon as you go live, you have access to analytics that you haven't seen before. But, yeah, we like the nuanced approach of making sure all of these systems talk together efficiently.

Greg Bray: Well, Kyle, we appreciate your time today. Do you have any last words of advice that you'd like to leave with our listeners before we wrap up?

Kyle Lintala: Just be curious about what your data can do and how you can leverage the data that you use on the day to [00:23:00] day or the data that is around you, especially on the sales and marketing side. There is a lot of data there. So, get curious, ask questions. Even if you don't know exactly who can solve it for you, you know, there's Google, there's ChatGPT. Yeah, get creative.

Greg Bray: Thank you, Kyle. If somebody wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Kyle Lintala: Yeah, so our domain, our website is bilt.solutions and bilt is B I L T. Hop on our website and there's a contact form there or you can email me and it's K L I N T A L A @bilt.solutions.

Greg Bray: All right. Thanks everybody for listening today to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:24:00]