eSUB Stories: Q&A with Rosie Wendell at Todd Morris Fire Protection

eSUB Stories is a new series featuring eSUB team members and customers to go behind the scenes and get to know the people building and using our software. Today, we get to know Rosie Wendell, office manager at Todd Morris Fire Protection in San Rafael, California.

Tell us about Todd Morris Fire Protection.

Todd Morris Fire Protection designs, installs, and repairs residential and commercial fire sprinkler systems in Marin County & San Rafael, California. We know what it takes to keep your building and the people you love safe and protected in the serious case of a fire. Our goal is to help put fires out as quickly as possible. We design all of our sprinkler systems with safety and efficiency in mind. We ensure your systems are completely up to code and meet all local building standards and regulations.

What differentiates Todd Morris Fire Protection from other companies?

Many people talk about the continuing labor shortage in construction. Finding young apprentices is difficult. Todd pays our apprentices’ education with a five-year guarantee that they will work for Todd Morris Fire Protection. This allows us to develop skilled employees and maintain a good reputation. When we do not know about a job, contractors will contact us to bid on it because they want to work with us. We’ve pretty much rebuilt most of the systems in San Francisco and Santa Rosa.

What projects excite you?

There’s a boarding school nearby, and we have a contract to put sprinklers in all of the dorm rooms. Because of COVID, we’re working with a lot of churches to help in their improvements to fire protection. These churches also serve as first responder locations where people can stay temporarily until they find a place. It is nice to honor those who help others.

Tell us about some of the technology that you are using.

We started using eSUB last year, because we knew we needed construction project management software. We did not accurately track project activity and payments and discovered that we were not paid over $600,000 in retention. File cabinets and paper timesheets were used to track our jobs. Naturally, it became difficult to distinguish which change orders and which labor hours went to which job. We needed a system to input and centralize all of the information to keep our foremen, outsourced bookkeepers, and office all in sync. eSUB took everything we are looking for, including files, invoices, and timesheets, and centralizes it in an online platform. With tablets and smartphones, everyone is connected electronically in real-time. With everyone using eSUB, we can track our documents and invoices much easier.

What benefits are you and the team at Todd Morris Fire Protection experiencing using eSUB?

eSUB is just as easy as Google for me and everyone here. The Foremen have tablets, and they can clock in and out at the job site and document activity in the daily reports.  We are definitely saving time with them no longer needing to drive into the office on Fridays to do paper time cards. The Quickbooks integration makes payroll so easy. We’re a small company that can do big things, and eSUB is helping us grow. We are improving productivity and increasing the number of commercial projects to grow by 40%.