Since 1984, Innovative Mechanical has produced award-winning HVAC work for business owners and residents throughout the Bay Area. Their mission is to “strive to build lifetime relationships with customers while remaining a leader in the industry.” To meet the challenges of an evolving construction landscape while staying true to their mission, Innovative Mechanical took their bid board online with Bid Board Pro by BuildingConnected, which has eliminated missed deadlines, double-booked job walks, and miscommunication.
“When I first came to Innovative Mechanical, our bid board was a whiteboard, and everybody had written on there — due dates, job walks, and more,” says Vice President of Business Development, Kevin Frederick. This led to major headaches and missed job walks, request for information deadlines, and other crucial milestones.
Marketing Manager Stephanie Cunich recalls: “When I first started doing closeouts for jobs, I would write it down on the whiteboard. But somebody could walk by and accidentally erase half of what I did. I’d sit there and think, ‘What did you just do?’”
“It became a coordination nightmare,” said Frederick.
“With BuildingConnected, everybody can coordinate who’s going where. It gets assigned in the calendar instead of leaving things to chance,” says Frederick. “The more streamlining we can do in a more digital world, the easier our work becomes.”
“BuildingConnected makes sure everyone’s looking at the same thing. It gets rid of the old method of writing everything down by hand, which is where you’d make mistakes. The electronic factor is huge — it’s definitely changing the industry,” says Cunich.
“Everything goes by so fast,” says Senior Estimator, Alan Droutsas. “That’s the most challenging part of our industry. These projects go so fast that you have to be on target from day one, and you stay on task until the completion.”
According to Frederick, this time saved with Bid Board Pro makes a huge difference:
“On average, I’d say BuildingConnected saves us at least a full work day per week — just by being able to download documents, have all the bid invites, and submit bids, instead of going through standard emails. We can just do our standard bid submission through BuildingConnected. So it saves us quite a bit of time.”
“About two or three years ago, we started seeing a number of our clients using BuildingConnected and sending out their own invitations. Then it started snowballing and almost all of our clients now use it.”
For Innovative Mechanical, time saved through BuildingConnected means more time for the things that matter, including more time out in the field, more time for building customer relationships, and more time to focus on delivering the highest quality work for years to come.