Count the Minutes

Issue 23

The Headline Story

It’s 6:40 on a Tuesday and a framing foreman is at your will-call counter with a material list on his phone. Your counter guy reads it off the screen, types it in one line at a time, checks a price and prints the ticket. Two more trucks are waiting in the lot. How long did that take? Four minutes? Fourteen? At most yards nobody knows, because nobody has ever timed it.

Builders FirstSource has. On its earnings call Thursday, CEO Peter Jackson said the company tested a new sales app that cut the time it takes customers to place an order by up to 90%.

BFS is your biggest national competitor for builder business, with about 575 locations in 43 states. Its sales are down and its margins are squeezed, same as yours. When it told investors where technology is paying off, one example it gave was no breakthrough at all. It was making it faster for a builder to give them an order.

Take the 90% with a grain of salt. It’s a test, it’s their number, and “up to” means the best case. But the direction is plain. Builders are going to notice which supplier is easiest to order from, and the biggest one in the country is working on it. BFS also led a funding round for a startup whose AI pulls a builder’s plans and paperwork into one place, from before construction through warranty.

In Issue 20 I wrote that more of the easy part of serving a customer is moving onto the customer’s own device. BFS didn’t say whether its app runs on the builder’s phone or the counter’s screen, but it’s chasing the same thing: fewer minutes between “here’s my list” and a ticket. You don’t need an app or a startup to start answering. You need to know how long it takes a builder to give you an order today.

What Else Mattered

Microsoft added month-end bookkeeping to Copilot in Excel: matching balances and transactions, flagging what doesn’t tie out, and drafting the entries your bookkeeper keys in by hand. Copilot’s general finance features in Excel are already out; the bookkeeping piece is early access and needs a paid Copilot license. If you already pay for Copilot, have your controller try it on one reconciliation. If you don’t, this isn’t the reason to start. Notice where it’s aimed: the same kind of repetitive work where BFS found its 90%.

Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, ran a test every yard using AI should know about. Fifty professional analysts worked a business decision with an AI assistant. On four choices, Anthropic secretly flipped a coin to decide which side the AI would argue. The advice was random. The analysts still went its way 86% of the time, when ignoring it would have landed near 50%. Their final calls moved less. Most repeated its reasons as their own; only 15% gave it credit. Anthropic made the AI push harder than normal and tested one job, but the pattern is real enough to act on: people follow AI’s lead, even a random one, and often don’t know it.

The Pattern Behind the Week

Put those together and you get a simple rule for where AI belongs in your yard. BFS never credited its 90% to AI, and doesn’t need to: the number shows where the minutes are. Point AI there: typing in orders, matching statements, chasing paperwork. Keep your people in charge of the judgment calls: what to charge, how much credit to extend, which builder to chase. That’s where the coin flip wins.

The mistake is doing it the other way around. AI sounds smartest on the judgment calls, so that’s where people try it first, while the order typing goes on the way it always has.

What to Do Now

1. Have your counter manager time the next 20 will-call and phoned-in orders, from the moment the customer starts giving the order until the ticket is in his hand. Write down the typical time, the slowest, and where the minutes went: retyping a list, looking up a price, a credit hold. That’s your starting number. You can’t judge anyone’s 90% claim without it, including your own software vendor’s.
2. Email your ERP vendor one question: what does our current system already include that lets a contractor send or place an order from his phone, and what would it take to turn it on? Ask for an answer by Friday and the names of two dealers your size who use it.
3. Then take the coin flip out of your big decisions. Add one rule to your AI use policy and tell your managers Monday: on any call big enough that you’d want to know who made it, a big bid, a new credit line, a stocking bet, the person writes down their own answer before asking AI. You set the dollar line. The AI’s answer goes next to theirs, not in place of it. It costs nothing.

What I’m Watching

• BFS Investor Day on November 17. Jackson said the company will say more there about how technology is paying off. I want to know whether the ordering app moves past a test, and whether they put dollars on it.
• Microsoft’s bookkeeping preview. I’m watching for the first real before-and-after month-end numbers from a company Microsoft didn’t hand-pick.

One Question Worth Asking

How long does it take a builder to give you an order, and who at your place knows?