South Bay Grading Doubles Output with SharpeSoft

The Story

Located in balmy Santa Clara, California, South Bay Grading is a fully licensed Class A General Engineering Contractor. With over 30 years of experience in the field, owner and President Shawn Dean brings a mindset geared towards success to the Northern California construction landscape. Adaptable and honest, South Bay Grading has achieved marked success in their field, be it working for public or private entities.

We sat down with project manager and estimator Aaron Hosmer to get the full story.

400 Reed St #155, Santa Clara, CA 95050

The Challenge

All around successful at targeting their chosen line of work already, South Bay Grading knew that there was an opportunity for growth, if only they could reasonably manage an increase in bidding output. The source of the trouble quickly became apparent: Microsoft Excel could simply not keep up with more demand.

After shopping around with a few of the construction industry’s big names, South Bay landed on SharpeSoft in part due to the culture of serving with excellence we strive to maintain daily.

“I think we came across William Ontiveros and SharpeSoft about a year or a year and a half ago. We engaged with him when we were bidding work out of Excel. We had talked to B2W and HCSS, and we really liked William’s hands-on approach with the sales process. The reason why we were looking around is we knew we wanted to step up our estimating volume. We knew we needed something besides doing it in Excel.”

Previous Solutions

“We started off with a basic Excel template that was one bid item. It has your labor, materials, equipment, hours, rate per hour, a markup column and then a total column. Then we’d copy and paste that down so we could have mobilization, clearing and grubbing, cut to fill, etc., all the way down, and that would be for grading. Then I’d create a new tab for demo, for underground pipe… all of that stuff. Then once we started getting a little bit more sophisticated, we’d start putting in overhead items.

“One of the biggest issues with Excel, it’s not a huge one but to a lot of people it is; spreading your overhead across all the bid items, which is something that SharpeSoft does really well. There’s a lot of tedious manual manipulation of cells and checking formulas. Sometimes you feel like you’re going crazy, you’re 10 minutes before the bid and you’re trying to get this all dialed, and you have to make sure that you didn’t misplace cell C1 with cell D1.”

“I would get this feeling of dread when there was a rebid or they changed up some bid items. I would be like, oh man I know what this means, and I would be picturing all of the operations I would have to do to make this work in Excel. It’s another six hours of Excel work. In SharpeSoft it’s just much simpler, much cleaner. Replicating estimates and item masters, which we’re getting pretty deep into right now, a lot of those features have cut out some of the tedium and that cringy feeling of bidding work from the process.”

“There have been times when a cell got copied over wrong or a formula was wrong. One of them was updating material pricing. If you want to go in and adjust your material across the job, it’s a simple operation. That kind of thing right there, which could be kind of a crazy operation in Excel between the complexity and uncertainty is removed with SharpeSoft.. If you want to swap out a 20,000 lbs. excavator for a 55,000 lbs. excavator, it’s just a snap. The same is true with changing labor rates or kinds of equipment.”

Getting in Contact

“When we purchased the program, William got on the phone with me and we talked about what type of info he needed, which is pretty much what I expected. So I sent him all of our equipment rates and labor rates, and he populated all of that into the new database. The best part about it is every time you put a material or anything into the tables, it’s there to be used later.”

“We actually started using the system immediately, even before training. So I sat there and I just went through and kind of taught myself SharpeSoft for a week or two, then I came back to the support team and I asked to schedule a meeting to answer some questions. We went through it, they cleared up all of our questions, and then we were off to the races. I was already training our project engineer Jared Dean on how to use it."

While SharpeSoft’s training regimen for newly onboarded clients is top notch, we also recognize the computer skill level of clients may vary. Therefore, SharpeSoft encourages active learners who want to get a jump start on improving bid quality in any way it can. To that end, SharpeSoft offers multiple different avenues for extracurricular training, including quick-start Fast Trax lessons, as well as traditional online programming.

Interaction with SharpeSoft

“I think William’s willingness to work with us…we have a consulting side of the business where we bid work for other people, and we talked to William about bringing other contractors into the ecosystem. Some of the bigger platforms felt too impersonal, and the price point is much higher, so we didn’t feel like we were getting the love from them. Service is key for us. So when we looked at SharpeSoft, it looked like it did everything and more that those bigger platforms provide.”

How has SharpeSoft Helped

“We chose SharpeSoft because of the solution that it offered, and when we went into it, I figured we would be doubling our estimating volume, but I think we’ve tripled or maybe even quadrupled our output since integrating with SharpeSoft, which has been really exciting to see.”

“We were bidding anywhere from $500,000 to $750,000 a week in volume, just between me and Shawn Dean, South Bay’s owner. The crazy part is we brought in Shawn’s son Jared, who is working at a totally unrelated type of job, no experience in construction. We brought him in and trained him how to use SharpeSoft, and the kid is bidding 2.5 million dollars a week in SharpeSoft on his own. He’s just in the other office right now cranking away, using Bluebleam, PlanSwift, AgTek, importing to SharpeSoft. He’s dialing in all of our item masters too, so the output has been crazy.”

“So the fact that we have a semi-green estimator who has taken to this program like a fish to water speaks volumes about SharpeSoft. It’s a different type of program than I’ve ever used, it works a little differently than a typical Microsoft Office program, but once you understand how the different windows work it’s pretty simple.”

Would you Recommend SharpeSoft

"Oh absolutely. I mean, we recommend it to all of the contractors in our network, and we’re constantly talking about it in our weekly meetings."

"It’s just like any other platform. If people think they’re just going to wake up and walk in and start using SharpeSoft, that’s just not realistic. You’ve got to put some time in and sit there and run through an estimate. But the support team responds super quick, and they’re available. When I text William he texts me back within the same hour typically, and then I’ll get an email from the support team following through on that. William’s very supportive, and helps me answer questions that I need answered. So I’ve been pretty happy with the level of support. It’s not a hard program to use by any means, it’s just that estimating programs aren’t like your typical Windows or Microsoft programs. So you have to go into it with a little bit of an open mind when it comes to learning something new."