ENC Construction automates crew management with Hubstaff geofencing

Javier Enciso Jr. was in high school when he drafted a business plan for his construction company. Without having any prior experience, he already had the passion and drive to run the best construction business in Chicago.

After getting his first job as a handyman and spending years learning the trade, Enciso founded ENC Construction and Development. Since that fateful decision in high school to pursue construction as a career, he has built ENC into a local construction and development icon.

“I underpriced the s--- out of my first job,” said Enciso. “At the time, I thought I had priced it fairly, but I still had a lot to learn.”

After several new clients and more on-the-job experience, Enciso was ready to break out and found his company.

“It has been a learning process,” said Enciso. “From learning how to price and markup correctly to reading floor plans to knowing the difference between rehabbing a house built in 1867 versus one from 1945.”

With his newfound knowledge, he built his team and started taking clients. They began erecting new homes, renovating developments, and rebuilding entire areas of Chicago.

But, as the ENC team started to grow, Enciso began to notice a few problems. Starting with his employees and their ongoing projects.

A problem with any on-site job is that it’s hard to know when your people are actually working.

While Enciso trusts his team, there was still a lot of back and forth when it came to payroll and time cards.

He really had no way of knowing whether or not his crew actually showed up when they said they did. Even if they were telling the truth, he didn’t know precisely what job site they were at.

This made it complicated when it was time to figure out payroll for his hourly team.

Knowing how much he was spending on labor was extremely important to Enciso.

“It tells me how much I spend on any given task,” Enciso said. This was the only way he could adequately build budgets and estimate future jobs.

With paper time cards and payroll being tracked in a spreadsheet, he was uneasy that all his information was inaccurate.

It was also cumbersome to keep track of manually.

“I started searching online for something to track employee time, with a GPS-enabled service,” Enciso said.

He knew that if ENC was going to have extremely accurate books, he’d need the technology to back it up.

“I wanted workers to clock in daily and on each job site, as my time had slowly become more limited so I could no longer do it manually.”

Thankfully, he found Hubstaff.

The biggest thing Enciso was looking for was the ability to track his team, regardless of where they were.

Hubstaff’s geofenced job sites made that possible.

With job sites, you can set up a digital barrier known as a geofence. Once a crew member enters or leaves a set area, their smartphone’s GPS will automatically clock them in or out.

For Enciso, this meant that he didn’t have to continually check in with his crew or hop in his truck and monitor the job in person.

Additionally, it simplified scheduling. He was now able to schedule crew members for specific jobs, and there was no question of who was supposed to be on-site on any given day.

Hubstaff sends alerts when shifts are started late, left early, or missed completely. That’s one less thing for Enciso to track on his own.

With Enciso’s entire crew automatically tracking time, Hubstaff was able to generate reports that offered a deeper look at operations.

This meant that Enciso didn’t have to spend so much time manually figuring out the time tracked and how that translated to the budget.

When he needs to invoice a client, Hubstaff will automatically tell him what they owe and can export this as a PDF or send it directly to the client.

Since introducing Hubstaff, ENC has been able to more accurately track jobs without adding more work.

Enciso was able to implement a system that not only gave him time back daily, but also gave him the ability to take a step back and know that his crew was staying on track.

“I am still extremely far from where I wish for my company to be,” Enciso said.

But he knows that, with Hubstaff’s help, he’ll be able to build his business into a well-oiled construction machine.