As Paul ask ask What Up? What Up? What Up? What Up?
Everybody? Welcome to another episode of Let's Ask Paul, the podcast where
you get to ask me all questions related to the National Electrical Code. It
doesn't matter whether it's twenty twenty, twenty twenty three, twenty fourteen, twenty
seventeen. If you've got questions, you can go to Paul Abernathy dot com
free of charge and submit your questions. It's been running now for a couple
of years. We've been doing Let's Ask Paul now for a while. We're
up to I believe we're up to episode one hundred and thirty six. So
it's been a great, great podcast series, the Let's Ask Paul series.
But also remember that we have over seven hundred almost eight hundred podcasts that you
can listen to episodes, And all you got to do is go to your
favorite listening platform and just search for master the NEC podcast and you can.
You'll get tons of them. Just scroll through them. You'll see all kinds
of episodes on all kinds of things. I've got some mobile episodes where I'm
just talking to you the listener as I'm riding in my vehicle. Something comes
to mind, I want to talk about it. So again, all types
of topics in man. It dates back for years. In fact, the
Master the podcast now has actually been going on for nine years, over nine
years, so again, so it's it's been around. People come and go
obviously in this educational world, but we've been around for quite a long time.
In fact, I've been doing episodes since two thousand and four, believe
it or not. So again, it's quite amazing all the episodes that we
have out there, back when it was the Electrical Guru, and then even
before that. So again, there's a lot of stuff out there on it.
But go check it out over on any of your favorite listening platforms.
Or you could make it easy for yourself. You could just get our mobile
app. And our mobile app is free and all you have to do is
just go to our website. You can pick it up at fasttracksystem dot com,
or you can go to Electrical Code Academy dot com, dot net dot
org whatever, pick it up there if you want as well, you'll see
a little link for the mobile app and load it now. It's not going
to load anything on your phone. It's called up PWA Progressive Web App.
Means it. All it really does is when you click on the link,
it'll ask you do you want to put an icon on your homescreen, And
that's just so you can click it, and basically it opens up a browser
in your phone or your device, and it acts like a mobile app,
So it is a mobile app. It has all the function of a mobile
app, but it doesn't put any garbage on your phone, and y'all know
me, I don't like that kind of stuff. So all it's doing is
putting a quick link on your phone, and it has a button, and
it looks like an app, but it's really in the cloud. And that's
the way of the future because I can make updates at any time and they
get carried straight immediately all across our platform. So if I'm adding something like
some more calculators or some resources or other quick links, you get access to
it right away. So that's pretty cool. But one of the features in
the app is you can listen to our podcast and the course. If you're
listening to it on your phone, then you could stream it to any your
mobile devices like you Alexa or speakers or Bluetooth speakers or whatever you want to
send it to. And maybe you're on the job site. You get one
of those portable bluetooth stereos and you sit it there, you send it and
maybe every morning or once a week, you get all the guys together.
Maybe you're the owner and you want to treat them all to some drinks or
something or whatever. You get them all together, you put them around,
you send an episode to that speaker, and everybody gets to learn something about
the National Electrical Code. Okay, and then maybe you challenge your guys or
gals. Don't want to leave LEXI out and all that time, maybe what
you do is you challenge them to come up with questions and they can also
submit them over at Paul Abernathy dot com. And so that's a perpetual learning
process that is so awesome. So again we think everybody. Again, this
is a month after month, we have over three hundred thousand downloads. So
again I'm super excited about through all of our platforms combined, that's the kind
of downloads that we get. So I do appreciate everybody that listens to our
podcast. Right, So today's question that came in, and I'm gonna warn
you up front, it's it's going to sound a lot like a commercial.
Right, I know, I know, I know. It's a It's one
of those turn offs, right, You're like, Okay, Paul is selling
something, Well, it's not our courses. The question came in asking about
a recommendation for a program or software that allows him to manage his projects.
They're a growing company. Well, well, i' let me read the email.
Let me read the email says, Hey, Paul, love your podcasts,
love your videos. Can't wait until the twenty twenty three fast tracks comes
out because some of my guys are going to start testing, and by the
time they're ready the twenty twenty three, we'll be adopted in my state.
I'm assuming he must be in texas he goes. I do have a question
though, as we start to grow, keeping track of all my employees and
all the projects that we have going on, and certain tasks that I'd assigned
to my employees and how they interact with the customers. I heard that you
owned a software company that allows me to be able to interact with my customer
over video or chat, as well as with my technicians and can track any
project that we got going on. Appreciate any input you can give me on
this or any advice that you can share, Take care and keep up with
the podcasts. Okay, well, great question. That's enough of that,
the great question. And it does absolutely allow me to segue into another product
that we own that I guess people still aren't aware of, and we have
quite some customers that use it and they're very pleased with it. But I
don't talk about it a whole lot because it's not really tailored just for electricians.
It's for anybody that has people to manage projects, to manage tasks that
they need to manage. Like I say, I use it internally for our
projects here and different tasks that Brittany needs to get done or I need to
get done, or Zach or Jeff or so we use it as well.
But it's kind of what we call a white label, and what that means
is that you can tailor it to any need that you have where you might
have projects or tasks going on and you need to track those tasks. You
need to keep projects in line in order, and you assign certain employees to
it, and you want to make sure that they're logging in, checking in
what their activity is, all that type of stuff, and that's what our
PPM Butler is all about. So if you haven't heard about it, the
PPM is just professional project management and Butler is just part of our suite of
Butler software services, from accounting software to website profiles to website design. We
own all these companies here under the corporate label and they're marketed different ways.
But the PPM Butler is a project management software and a CRM which is a
customer resource management or customer retention management system that allows you to interact with your
customer. They get to see as much as you want them to see about
a project, but only the much as you want to give them, so
you control all of it. And it's really really neat software. And we
acquired the software. I guess now it's been I mean it's probably been six
months, maybe maybe eight months or whatever, but it is. It's amazing
software. And it's really for any company, whether it's electrical, plumbing,
mccamical, it really doesn't matter. It could be a real estate agent.
If you have employees under you and you need to manage them and make sure
that they're finishing projects on time, make sure they're finishing special tasks that you
assign them. You can look at it. You can share files between your
agents or maybe your project managers or your employees. You can have different levels
of authority, so it's pretty neat. And how you do this. You
can have again team members where you share stuff between. They can actually track
time on projects, how much the employee actually spends, So it's got a
built in tracking system. And it also has built in communication systems since that's
unique because it utilizes a proprietary video conferencing system that allows you within the phone
when you're logging in our system, that you can connect visually without using something
like a zoom or whatever, So you don't have to worry about your information
being shared outside of our software system. And you get to share back and
forth. And you can even let your customers interact with your project manager or
with your lead project person. You control all that as the admin to your
access point. But other neat things about it is it allows your employees to
log in and track sales leads. Maybe they're on a job and somebody asks
about your hey, I need I need a quote for this, Well,
they can actually track those leads and put it in themselves, which ultimately is
going to make you more money because it's going to really kind of start that
lead generation process. It also allows you to do bidding, It allows you
to do invoicing, It allows you to take payments via the system, so
that yet saves you money from having to have some kind of merchant system or
merchant account. It's all built into it. One other need feature that it
does is it it does electronic timesheets, so your employees will, you know,
you tell them they have a clock in and they clock out and it
tracks it, and it also tracks where they are. And it also does
time tracking for any projects, so they arrive at one project, they check
in, and then when they leave that project they check out. That way,
the right amount of time is allotted to certain projects. So that is
unique within our system. It's built right in. It's no extra module,
it's already in there. And of course we talked about the internal chat system.
Everybody within the system can chat and share information, share files, share
images, communicate, so that's a kind of a unique system in there as
well. It allows you to take taxes if you want to do your taxing,
if you're in a state that you have to charge sales tax or any
other type tax. It's already has that built in, so no, you
don't have to worry about buying any extra function for that. It also has
a unique HR feature in there, and that is if your employee needs to
take leave, then they can initiate it through the system. And so it's
great for tracking when employees have time off and then you as an ADMIN or
maybe one of your project managers that you would sign as an admin, they
can keep track of people taking time off or requesting and you can deny it
or approve it all through the system. So that's pretty cool as well.
And I mentioned invoicing and estimating. Yes, it's got a built an estimator
with the templates and everything. You have your logo on it, so it's
a turnkey system. So that's just some of the features that it has.
Here's what though, I recommend people also, and you can do reports on't
of anything, monthly reports, weekly reports, daily reports, all those type
of things. But here's what I recommend people do. Don't take my word
for it. I tell people all the time, test drive it, kick
the tires. It doesn't cost you anything. It's free to try it out
for seven full days and you get it unlocked when you get all the features
for seven days. Now. I'm sure you're not going to use everything,
but at least you can initiate it and play with it and play with the
team members. Sign Some team members do some invoicing expenses. Hey, that's
another neat thing. If you send your guys or gals to the supply house
and they pick up something and you're worried about whether or not they keep that
receipt or how they do that, Well, it has it built in feature
for expenses. You just use your internal phone, take a picture of whatever
the receipt is, and it loads right into the system for that specific project.
So it keeps it in the cloud and we take care of storing that
information for you. I mean, you can do notes to each other,
notes to the client. You can do to do lists. You can create
again tasks that have to be done by a certain time. That way you
hold people accountable. It's got an internal notification system that lets you know that
there's a message waiting or a task needs to be completed. You get a
visualization board that tells you kind of where you are in all these tasks.
So if you have somebody at the office that's managing this they can actually assign
projects and things through it, and they can do this and then course you're
a project manager or employees, when they log in, they'll see you notice
and they know that there's a message for them and all things like that.
It has internal support, It has attendance taking in case you do attendance for
people showing up at job sites. Payment gateway is already built into it,
so you don't have to worry about it. You can set up Stripe,
which is the easiest one that I recommend, and I've used them all.
I love Stripe. You know, you can do Square, but I can't
stand Square. They'll rip you off. But Square has been pretty straightforward.
And so you know, there's so many things that you can do in this
to help grow your business manage projects. But one of the key things is
the CRM the customer. So along the way, you can even issue a
log in for your customer. If you have a project and you want your
customer to feel more engaged, and you want to be engaged with your customer,
then you can share them their own unique log in. They can log
in, you get to share what they get to see and what they can't
see, and you can share details about the projects so they can see how
their project's coming along. And you can even have it so that the customer
can communicate with your project manager. That way, there's that constant level of
communication and you can turn those things on and off as you choose. So
there's just so much in here. I am so proud to own it as
a company or corporation. Not me, but the Electrical Code Academy is a
Texas based corporation. It owns rights to this software. It's ours. We
administer it and our servers. How's it And it's just an amazing software.
So where do you go to get it? You just go to www dot
PPM Butler dot com PPM Butler and it's You know, I'm biased, obviously,
but through the years when I was a contractor and I had to manage
employees, manage project managers, I needed a way to make sure that jobs
were getting done and nothing fell between the cracks. And if I assigned a
task to somebody, I want them to be able to log in on their
phone. It simply works from any phone. They log in and they can
see what task I have set up for them, when I expected to get
done, and if you don't get it done, I'm gonna hold you accountable.
So that's all built into the software. And again it works amazing on
your phone and so again very simple, seamless, very secure, all HTTPS.
So if you're interested in it, go check it out. Give it
a free test seven days. You got nothing to lose, goes. Sign
up for free account over at PPM Butler dot com. Give it a world,
put in a couple of projects. You know, you might have a
little rough time with it at first because you've probably never used a project management
software, but it gets easier and the customers that we have right now are
using it like crazy. So you know, we love to promote it.
You don't hear me talk about it much because I'm an educator. I teach
electrical courses and training and all this stuff. But this is just another part
of our company, our corporation that is so focused at offering software solutions to
our customers. I mean, I bet some of you didn't know that we
Actually everybody out there, electrician contractor owner should have a profile online to share
with somebody, Okay, whether you email it to them or you use one
of those NFC's near field communication apps or whatever, you tap your phone to
another phone and all that kind of stuff. You've seen it. Well,
we have a division that does all that, and we have profiles that are
called profile Butler dot com. And you can get a free profile if you're
interested. It's free. Go get you on um. It's very limited unless
you want to pay for the bells and whistles. But we have Profile Butler
dot com. You know, we have if you want a website, you
need a quick website. You want an easy way to do the website that's
affordable and you just fill in the information. It's so easy. Then we
also have Empire like Empire State Building, Empire Butler dot com. Okay,
so we have so many things here at Electrical Code Academy Incorporated. It's not
just the education, but sometimes people, you know, they don't know that
because we're I'm so used to be an electrical educator, you know, I
don't really share that much about the other stuff that we own. But yeah,
it's it's all out there. And if you want to see all of
the Butler stuff that we have, if you're interested in that, then just
go to the Butler Suite, the Butler Suite dot com, right and that
is where you can actually look at everything that we have. And you know,
we have an accounting software. You know, I don't talk a lot
about the accounting software, but it's amazing as well. So if you're interested
in that, or you want to have some instant accounting, that way you
get some reports that you can print off. If you happen to use QuickBooks,
well this is affordable to be able to track it on your phone and
then you could print off any reports to then transfer into QuickBooks if you want.
Because QuickBooks is expensive. This isn't nowhere near as expensive, right,
But I mean, there's just you have just so much stuff available, and
so if you're interested in looking at all the stuff we have, just go
to www. Dot the Butler Suite dot com and you'll see all the different
stuff that we have. So if you're interested in that, just another division
of Electrocode Academy. Okay, all right, folks, I hope that answered
your question. That is the software that I'd recommend, and it is amazing.
It does everything that you can think of when it comes to project management.
I can't think of anything else that you would need to manage your projects,
keep your tasks going forward. Keep holding people accountable and the program will
grow as you grow. Right, so if you're interested in it, check
out PPM Butler dot com. Again, the PPM is Professional Project Management Butler
dot com. So PPM butler dot com. Hopefully that answers your question and
it helps you helps you grow your business. Until next time, folks,
stay safe and God bless, and remember you can submit your code questions to
Paul Abernathy dot com. Till next time, Stay safe, God bless.
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