Like many custom builders a few years ago, Scott Jerald was struggling to keep his business, ASJ Development (asjdevelopment.com), afloat. He searched for leads while finding ways to meet payroll each month. In October 2008, business slowed dramatically and three cancellations came within one month’s time. Layoffs soon followed, including the release of Jerald’s colleague who moved from out of state to work with Jerald in Georgia. The staff shrank from five to one.

As a builder averaging three to five homes a year, three cancellations was devastating to Jerald’s business; it was time for action. The military veteran recalled his Ranger days and thought, “A soldier always has a plan, a good soldier has a plan B and a great soldier has plan C,” he says. “So I started developing my course of action. I needed to retool my business.”

Jerald looked at his customer base and realized many of them were entrepreneurs — business owners — so he created an advisory board and asked a few of them to become members. “They told me I needed to invest in software, my processes, and logistical systems and combine them if possible,” he recalls.

Execute solutions

The solution to Jerald’s problem involved many sub-solutions, so he drew up plans for executing them. He invested in his business as suggested by his new advisers, beginning with accounting software, which he realized was not designed for a home builder.

“I looked at the ease of use, what my accounting costs were, and the fact that at year-end I still had to hire someone to go through my books to get them right. It was inefficient.

I put my criteria together and did a search.

A big item on my wish list was the ability for my accountant to spend no more than one hour to do my tax return. We ended up buying new software that accomplished it,” Jerald says.

The local university provided a critical part of the solution to Jerald’s accounting problems — an intern. He asked for a student chasing a CPA or master’s in finance degree. In exchange, he allowed professors to use his company information as material for a class project. “Now I have a bookkeeper who tries harder and comes to the table with no preconceived concept of how accounting software works. This way, the software is used how it’s supposed to be used,” he explains.