Xpres Kitchen and Bath, based in Plymouth, Minnesota, specializes in kitchen and bathroom renovating. Under the leadership of Jamie Hommerding, the Vice President of Production, the company has established a reputation as a small business with excellent service.
An introduction to Xpres Kitchen and Bath
Jamie has been with Xpres Kitchen and Bath since its inception in 2016 and oversees day-to-day operations, which include working a variety of home construction projects, ranging from traditional kitchen and bath renovating to comprehensive design work. All of this is setup to cater to the evolving needs of their clients.
Origins and growth
The company’s journey began with the collaboration between Jamie and Dennis Guptill, who met through a mutual bookkeeper. Initially focused on bathroom renovating, the company quickly expanded services to include kitchen renovating and main floor renovations. Today, they even offer deck renovating, highlighting their versatility in a changing marketplace.
Adopting construction estimating software
For Jamie, using Buildxact construction management software is about more than just enhancing efficiency—it’s about revolutionizing their construction job management. Prior to Buildxact, using construction software was time intensive and expensive mainly because it involved learning new administrative techniques, often in the evenings and other off-hours.
“My life before Buildxact involved juggling multiple software tools, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs,” Jamie shared. “Now, with Buildxact, everything is in one location, and managing projects has become significantly easier.”
Jamie found the setup easy because Buildxact offers subscribers different levels of support, including online videos, emails and phone calls. As Jamie became more familiar with Buildxact, he was pleasantly surprised by the unique features that formed a platform of digital construction tools.
“We actually ended up finding that Buildxact did a lot more pieces of our business than what we originally thought we were getting into,” he said.
Accurate quoting and job costing
One of the standout features for Jamie has been the precision provided by Buildxact’s online quoting and estimating tool, which includes digital takeoffs for accurate material counts and pricing. Having the right pricing is critical, Jamie said. 
“If you aren’t tight with your numbers in a construction company, you are going to probably not last very long,” he said. “With Buildxact, I like the fact that you can control the material costs and the labor costs to the detail that you want.
“There’s also a box when you’re building your estimate for your markup percentage, which I find particularly nice because you can’t in the construction industry put the same markup on all materials, or you just won’t be competitive,” he said.
Intuitive job management
Buildxact is about more than winning more work and pricing it correctly, it’s about managing the job, on time and on budget. For instance, Buildxact’s scheduling feature, which assigns tasks in specific orders using Gantt charts, also has proven valuable for Xpres Kitchen and Bath.
“There’s a lot of different software out there, and very few of them focus on the production side and the ability to manage your workers … so when we filter our production calendar now, we can filter it by the job name that they’re on, or we can filter it by the employee, or the subcontractor that’s on the job. And it gives us the flexibility to have a better idea of what’s going on, on a day-to-day basis, with the people in the field.”
A well-organized construction company can deliver a phenomenal customer experience and can deliver a lot of profit for its owners. But it all starts with being organized on how the job is going to be put together and what the steps in the stages are, he said.
Tracking actual costs against the estimate
Before adopting Buildxact, Jamie and his team faced challenges with using multiple software tools, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs. By consolidating their administrative tasks into Buildxact, they improved their job management capabilities significantly.
This has allowed them to more closely track actual expenditures against estimated costs, even when it comes to the small things.
“Buildxact has given us the ability to identify some of those areas that are a little bit more expensive, that we were just kind of, you know, writing them off as not a big deal. And now it’s given us the ability to track some of those smaller pieces to better manage our profit margin,” Jamie said.
