Talking with Brandon, ArcSite Growth Marketing Manager

Green Shield believes that trust starts with transparency. As Michigan’s largest deck builder, Green Shield has replaced traditional graph paper and manual "time and materials" calculations with a premier digital design process.

The Green Shield Difference:

• Real-Time Transparency: Using mobile-first software on-site, our team draws your deck dimensions and generates a precise price in real-time. This eliminates the 30-minute delay typically spent consulting price books and provides homeowners with "straight talk" on costs immediately.
• Smarter Engineering: The software automatically accounts for complex variables—like angled boards, deck height, and concrete cutting, that manual drawings often miss. This ensures your vision is backed by a reliably engineered reality.
• Proven Reliability: Beyond the initial design, Green Shield uses this data to track crew performance across 3,500+ completed projects. This ensures that the high standards promised during the sales appointment are the exact standards delivered during construction.

Our team focuses on accuracy so you can focus on your home. By combining real-world experience with smarter technology, Green Shield ensures every homeowner receives a professional, on-the-spot estimate they can count on.

Adam: ArcSite's really cool because instead of having to calculate time and materials out in the field, we're able to just draw a deck. It's just that simple. Draw the deck with the dimensions and exactly what the customer wants and you get an accurate price. There's nothing else that I've seen in the in the marketplace that can offer that and that's really the reason we're using ArcSite. My name is Adam Rought. I'm the founder and CEO of Green Shield Deck Builders. We are Michigan's largest deck builder and we've built about three thousand five hundred decks and we build more every single month. What makes us unique? We've got a really really good composite that we use. We have a unique framing system that we use. We build decks the same way every single time. So what that means for the customer is they can expect the same thing that was a five star review before. They can expect the same thing that they get, every single time. So, we're truly unique in that way. We don't offer a lot of different brands. We're very very niche in that we only do composite decks and we do them really really well.

Brandon: I'm Brandon Osbrooks, I'm the growth marketing manager at ArcSite. ArcSite's a mobile first sketching and estimating tool for field contractors. So what problem were you originally trying to solve when you were looking for a tool like ArcSite?

Adam: Thing we were looking to solve is just kinda making our drawing look a little more professional because we were using graph paper. And after you build a couple thousand decks, if you're still using graph paper, just feel like there was something wrong with that. So we looked to ArcSite, it's affordable, it's kind of like a, could be a month to month solution where if we didn't like it, we could kinda dial it back. Works with an iPad. So those are kind of the things we're like, okay, I'm kinda drawn to it. It's one of the top apps on the app store, so I'm like, okay, there's gotta be something to this app. So I was trying it out, that's when I realized, wow, this is way more than I thought it would be. So the original intent was just for the drawing piece and it's kinda turned into also the pricing and then we're moving into the ability to present an estimate in the software and we're just scratching the surface. We're really excited about what the software is capable of and it's just made us look professional. So it knocked out of the park the original goal, which was make us look a little more professional with the drawing. Right. And reduce the amount of mistakes our salesmen were making. They're really trained to be deck designers and deck experts, not necessarily drafting experts. And it's very difficult in the field. You've got rain, you've got dogs jumping on you, you've got snow and blizzards, you got lots of things that you're kinda combating. And if you've ever tried to measure anything when you're measuring by yourself, it's a little more difficult because you gotta get your tape measures out, know, things like that. It just it there's a lot of elements that make it kind of difficult in the field and deck designers really can't be with really complicated software bringing out a MacBook into someone's home. Right. Just it's never gonna work.

Brandon: Yeah. What inefficiencies or costs were you dealing with? I know you kinda touched on this with the ground Yeah. Paper and the issues that come with that but was there an associated, you know, cost or

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. When we started using ArcSite, were seeing, much better efficiency because there's, an undo button for example, instead of having to get out an eraser. Works pretty good in the rain actually. So if in the light rain, you can still use the product in the software and you can you can take some quick notes and then get back to your truck. It has a freehand mode where I can actually write dimensions quickly and then I can come back into my truck and draw in case of bad weather Whereas I'm getting rained on and the paper starting to fall apart on me. So that's been really cool. Efficiency wise, it's faster. It's definitely more accurate, so you're doing less drawings. What we were finding in the field is they would do a drawing and then they do it again and then again. So usually like three times by the time they got to like a usable drawing and then when they turned it at the office, the office says, hey, you missed a lot of things. The cool thing about it is I can, I can kinda make funnels for the guys so they can't actually miss stuff? So it's created some efficiency grabs there. So yeah, absolutely. It's increased efficiency a lot.

Brandon: So could you kinda compare what the process looked like before ArcSite and like after ArcSite? So they have the they have the finished drawing like maybe the third or fourth revision of it. Yeah. What happens then versus what happens now with ArcSite?

Adam: Yeah. That's actually a big one. Previously, they would take the drawing and then they'd have to go to a price book and price based on the drawing that they made. Whereas ArcSite's doing it simultaneously in the background. So as they're drawing it, it's actually pricing it. So the second the drawing's done, we have a price and it's dead accurate. So that's huge. Pricing depending on the size of the job could take anywhere between ten to thirty minutes, and that's so that's completely cut out. Nothing against anybody but any human has the chance of making a mistake regardless of how long you've been doing it. So the more you can rely on software and machines, the better. And it's it's really helped our deck designers focus on what they're really trained and supposed to be doing, is designing a great lifetime deck for the customer. Cool.

Brandon: And what would you say that ArcSite's,

Adam: you know, allowed you to do now versus something that wasn't possible before? Being able to price at the same time as drawing has been probably the biggest benefit to us because the inaccuracies of pricing a deck are very common in the marketplace. So a lot of our competitors, it's all of them that I know of, will price a deck by square footage and linear foot of rail because it's the easiest thing for someone in the field to build to do. And if you think about it, even houses are kind of priced that way, a price per square foot. Well, as most people know, flooring types can change the value of a house like quickly, right? Tile and hardwood is much more expensive than like a sheet vinyl for example. So how can you price per square foot? It's not accurate based on the finishes. But what we were finding is unless you're extremely, in tune with what products you're using in the whole building practice, it's very difficult to accurately price and that's why you see quotes. What Green Shield was able to do is use ArcSite's powerful tool, to create every single product in detail. So as they draw the deck, it's actually much more advanced than just square footage, linear foot of rail. We're able to take things into account like height above deck, height of the deck, the amount of concrete that needs cut, lots of things that you wouldn't be able to necessarily bring in. So like angled deck boards, for example, how many posts the deck has, are all just examples of things that you wouldn't necessarily capture just by going by square foot and linear foot. Just never be accurate. You could be overcharging a really easy job or undercharging a complex job and you wouldn't really know until the project's done. It's just not fair to the customers that have a more simple deck that they should have to pay to kind of offset the more complex projects. We wanna be able to price super accurately and very specific to what we have, versus maybe something off the shelf that would be, very general or inaccurate. You know, if we

Brandon: take a step back from a leadership perspective, like how does it change how you look at your business?

Adam: What it's allowed us to be able to do is actually look at, hey, where were we selling, projects through the ArcSite software and then how did they turn out on the back end? So we're able to actually extract that data and put it into another app where we're we're able to actually check-in real time how our crews performed based on what it should have cost versus what it actually cost. And then we can look at maybe the pictures from that job in our other software and say, hey, these guys ran into some severe rot, maybe there was a swarm of bees or something like that, a terrible winter storm. There's typically a reason why a project may have not, performed very well, and this gives us the ability to grade each crew based on actual performance because the job is priced really accurately, using ArcSite's really amazing tools and features through the products in the software. That's that's really cool because that's one

Brandon: of the best best things about ArcSite is that it gives the the customer kind of a, you know, the transparency of being able to see exactly what they're paying for.

Adam: Absolutely. Transparency is key in this business. I think, contractors everywhere could learn a lot from being more transparent. ArcSite gives you the ability of looking transparent, being transparent, but also being professional at the same time and fast. For us, speed is very important because we're more of a high volume, company. We like to make a little less margin but do a lot more projects. So ArcSite gives us the ability to do that because we can price same day and get in and out and the customer is either gonna be comfortable with the prices or not, but regardless, we need to get them up priced quickly. A lot of times construction individuals of any trade really will come out, they'll measure and then they'll come back with a price because they're kind of shopping around. With Green Shield we're not doing that. We're actually able to price in the home right then and there so you can make an informed decision. And that's just been really really cool.

Brandon: Do you Has ArcSite impacted like your your close rates or you know, how many quotes you get out in a day or anything like that? Like what's it like from a production side?

Adam: ArcSite allows us to kinda speak the same language. So no matter what we're doing, we're tracking it. So over time, we can actually see what variables are actually costing us money and what aren't. So having ArcSite and being able to back test as jobs are getting completed, and compare how we thought we were gonna do to how we actually did. It's allowed us to keep refining our pricing, so that way we can give customers the most accurate up to date pricing every single day.