Revolutionary Product a Boost for Construction Industry

Rising Star Exaktime (54.58%) If creativity is 10 percent innovation and 90 percent perspiration then the folks at Exaktime are doing a lot of sweating. Since 2000 when the Woodland Hills-based company launched The JobClock, an innovative time-keeping system for the construction trade, the company has won considerable loyalty among clients who say it not only saves payroll costs, it saves time preparing payroll as well. But in a fragmented construction industry filled with harried small business owners, it takes more than an effective product to build a successful company. So Exaktime officials have busied themselves enhancing the capabilities of JobClock, efforts that began to show this year with a system that can monitor 10,000 job sites, track everything from payroll to the cost of installing drywall and network across geographies as well as company divisions. “The (original system) was really designed for the payroll clerk,” said Tony H. Pappas, CEO of Exaktime. “There are a lot more people at a company that care about this information. We have almost 40 reports now that allow you to slice and dice your business costs in a number of different ways compared to 10 before.” Exaktime’s founder Steve Simmonds got the idea for the JobClock from his own experience as a contractor. Because employees work on site where time clocks cannot go, his and other contractors’ workers were filling out handwritten timesheets from memory at the end of each week. Simmonds worried that those memories fell short when it came time to accurately reflect days when they arrived late or left early. “The problem is getting to work 10 minutes late can amount to a paid week of free vacation a year,” said Pappas. “So now when they get to a job site at 7:10, they touch a key tab that records their actual time, and what you get is a payroll that says what they worked.” Workers clock in and out using keys colored green for arrival and red for departure, and the information is transferred to the home office where it can be uploaded for payroll or manipulated to produce other reports on costs and expenses. Quick payoff At an entry cost of about $2,000, JobClock pays for itself in about six weeks, company officials say. “It seemed like a good idea to move to something that was more automated and more foolproof,” said Kim St. Dennis, office manager at Scharff Construction, one of Exaktime’s earliest clients. “Once we got it in and saw how accurate it was, we were able to expand on its uses so that our bidding became much tighter. We knew exactly how much something cost us.” The early days of the company were spent installing the system at generally small construction companies that typically had only a handful of active job sites at any given time with no more than about 250 workers. But Simmonds soon realized that JobClock had greater business potential. So in 2001, he brought in Pappas, an entrepreneur who previously founded Silverlake Communications, a wireless software company that he later sold to a larger company for $7 million. With his software expertise and the company’s intimate knowledge of the construction trades, Pappas began to expand the company to address a larger market. “When I started the company was barely making a dime,” Pappas said. “I’m good at taking a small concept and executing on those ideas knowing how to scale up a call center and build a development staff. I said, ‘that’s what you need or what’s going to happen is you’re just going to continue making small sales.’ ” Since then, Simmonds, who continues to be part owner, has left the company and four partners, including Pappas, have internally financed its growth to 32 employees. Exaktime has doubled its revenues in most of the recent years, growing about 55 percent to $7.3 million in revenues in 2005. This year, Exaktime clocked nearly $6 million in revenues as of June 30. The JobClock has won numerous industry awards including a 2006 IDEA Award from BusinessWeek magazine and a 2006 Innovative Housing Technology Award from the National Association of Home Builders and TecHome Builder magazine. In July Exaktime debuted a re-engineered JobClock that can manage at least 10,000 job sites in many states and meet the needs of companies with revenues of $50 million and more, a move the owners hope will catapult the company into a far larger arena.