Royal T Enterprises Feels the Royal Treatment with SharpeSoft
- Dylan C
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
The Story
Founded 20 years ago in St. George, Utah, Royal T Enterprises is a heavy civil construction
company that brings founder and president Tad Griffith’s decades of industry experience to the
southern Utah area. Specializing in jobs related to earthwork, underground utility, and hauling
transportation services, Royal T’s commitment to quality is felt in every relationship they build.
The Challenge
With a combined 40 years of experience, no one could ever say that Tad Griffiths had not
contributed significantly to the construction industry. But after so much time in the driver’s seat, Tad was beginning to look for a strategy by which he could reduce his direct involvement with Royal T Enterprises.
“We kind of have a family business now. My wife Alice is the CFO, I'm the president, and my son TJ is the chief operations officer out in the field. The expectation would be that Royal T Enterprises, along with our subsidiary companies Crown Transport and Royal T Trucking, would just keep running indefinitely under my son's control as Alice and I find a way to be less active day-to-day in the business.”
We here at SharpeSoft have spoken at length about the importance of a work-life balance in an
industry as demanding as construction. While his employees could absolutely be trusted without his direct oversight, Tad felt there was an opportunity to improve certain aspects of Royal T Enterprises at the same time. To that end, a proper estimating software solution was needed.
Previous Solutions
“Before I bought the SharpeSoft program, I just used Excel spreadsheets with multiple pages and databases that were formulated into a bid template. So, I was able to put equipment prices, labor prices, and material prices in the database. I would usually break the bid item down to the unit of measure before putting into my Excel spreadsheet. So, I would get my vendor and sub quotes and break them out with a calculator and plug them into the sheet. It was all Excel, and the hard part about that was building a template I could bid off of and teach other people the way we bid. That way I could pass on my experience to others, without them having grown up in the industry and doing all the work physically.”
“I had to build a template that had all of our bid items by division, general conditions, demo, earthwork, sewer, storm drain, water, concrete, asphalt, and extras. Those are the divisions that we bid in a civil engineering contract. Now we have a template where we could bid all those items. But it was all in Excel, and the pricing was all done through Excel. But honestly, after 15 years of doing it day in and day out, I had got to the point where I was using standard unit prices that I could use in my area, in my industry, on my projects, and I really wasn’t estimating anymore. I was just taking the numbers that I had, the numbers that I had which were the numbers the industry would bear and started plugging them.”
“The plugging gets you the job and it pays the bills, but it doesn’t tell you anything. It didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. It didn’t tell me labor, equipment, material, and subs in different line items. It didn’t tell me what my banker and what my bonding company wanted to know. They’d ask “what was your estimated profit going in?” “What did you clear?” “How come?” Well those are the questions I should have been asking myself before, but I wasn’t worried about it, because I do 50 projects in a year, and they all go in one big bucket. Well, we’re not doing that anymore.”
“Before we got SharpeSoft, I always wanted to do project profit and loss, i.e. job costing. When we do an estimate for a project, we’re essentially establishing our budget. Our budget is our cost and our time. Because you must figure out time when you do an estimate, so that’s what your budget is: cost and time. We needed to have SharpeSoft to be able to track that budget and then can modify the budget accurately. I couldn’t do that with plug numbers. I was searching long and hard for estimating software. We looked at some big ones; AgTek was probably the first one, and then Trimble, then Bid2Win, then Heavy Civil. I had previously bought ProCore, and the big programs scared the shit out of me. I knew better than to buy a big one, I already had experience managing ProCore. That was an absolute disaster.”
Getting in Contact
“I first found out about you guys from a Google search [laughs]. I looked for the top 10 estimating programs, and you were on the list.”
A testament to SharpeSoft’s commitment to being on the cutting edge when it comes to public
perception and availability, and the magnanimity of its userbase! It’s thanks to the numerous
satisfied users spreading positive information and taking the time to write compelling reviews
that has allowed SharpeSoft to once again place within the top 10% of favorably reviewed
products on platforms like SourceForge.
Interaction with SharpeSoft
“SharpeSoft as a company offered tremendous support to me getting my program started up and running. I’m not good at typing, and I don’t do databases. When I started my company 20 years ago, I didn’t own a computer, and when I graduated college we didn’t have computer programs. So SharpeSoft offered me a lot of support, and was willing and able to set up my databases. I gave them equipment lists with equipment rates. I gave them some manpower rates. I was even able to provide them with some spreadsheets that had some material pricing, so that they could enter some data for me to get me up and running. That was tremendous support right out of the gate. I was also able to call them pretty much whenever I needed.”
“I would just like to add that I never expected to get the kind of personal support that I get from SharpeSoft. The owner, William, was willing to come out to my company and spend a couple days with me to see how we run Royal T Enterprises, what Kind of business we are and define the scope of work we do. He spend enough time with me to go on a tour of about 5 of our project sites. That meant a lot to me, and it meant a lot to me to get continued support, and even friendship from William. He reaches out to me weekly or monthly, and we have communication back and forth. I really appreciate that. I didn’t expect that level of support from SharpeSoft.”
How has SharpeSoft Helped
Before settling on a final purchase for SharpeSoft, there was one more hurdle in the form of a
fellow competitor to get through.
“I ended up looking at SharpeSoft, and another smaller estimating program. The both of you guys were very similar, and did the same thing, and offered the same features. But ultimately, the reasons I chose SharpeSoft over the one were two things: you guys were more affordable, and it seemed like it was more user friendly.”
SharpeSoft knows that time is money, but also that money better spent results in time better
spent as well. In addition to a quality product offered at a reasonable price, SharpeSoft also
champions exceptional training offers–both online and in-person.
Would you Recommend SharpeSoft?
“Yeah, I probably already have. Every once in a while we need some subcontractors that are a lot smaller in scope than Royal T Enterprises. Some of my foremen have left, and I’ve trained probably 10 guys who have left for other companies, some of whom come back to work for us, and I recommend that they use SharpeSoft because of its user friendliness, and its ability to tell them what they really need to know. I wish I would have had it after I’d been in business for five years, or even sooner, but yeah I recommend it all the time to people.”