When Larcon Electric’s General Manager Brian Winn started with the company right out of high school in 1995, they were just a ‘5-person shop’.
Brian’s mentor’s protégé was Larry Anderson, who started the company with his wife Connie (Lar-con is a combination of both their names) in 1975. At the time, they focused on electrical work, but would also install windows to help grow the business.
Earlier in Brian’s career, Larcon branched out into multifamily contracting work, but today they primarily do commercial construction and have a service department.
Five office employees and 22 fieldworkers comprise Larcon’s team, plus 50 pieces of machinery.
Although they generally work within a 62-mile radius of Lubbock, Texas, their work with Big Ass Fans, a company doing what the name suggests, takes them as far as Oklahoma and New Mexico for installations.
Missing Invoices, Late Payments
Before Larcon implemented Assignar, Brian and Business Manager Annice Stephens were the only administrators. Brian ran the service and construction departments alone.
“We had so many systems in place, from spreadsheets to actual paperwork in the guy’s hands, time cards. It just was a lot to handle,” says Brian.
Brian had a ‘big book’ and a spreadsheet he would share weekly, so everyone could see their schedules.
To get paperwork from the field, he had his foreman come into the office once a week to drop off paperwork. When paperwork didn’t turn up, Brian would drive to the job site, only to find that it never got filled out. It wouldn’t be accurate at that point because it was a week old.
“The process was horrific. We hated it,” says Brian, “It was so bad that at some points, if we didn’t have the paperwork turned in, it didn’t get processed over to Annice, and we couldn’t bill it.”
For jobs that got ‘lost,’ Brian and his team had to review invoices once a month to find out which ones were never processed.
Sometimes they would be in workers’ cars, stuck beside their seats.
Getting the Right Info – Fast
Three years ago, Larcon brought on Assignar, which the team uses for scheduling, time-tracking, and collecting job site data through forms.
“[Custom forms] was a game changer for us to be able to see all that information in a really concise manner and get it to our customers if we need to,” explains Brian.
Brian says most of their fieldworkers are great with the Assignar app and don’t experience any issues.
They use the app to check in and out of the job site and use custom forms to fill out work orders. Brian says the forms make the process easier for workers to fill out and job site information more concise.
“We figured out how to filter [form data], and then Annice could pull it up, do the custom print, and has all the material there.”
They use the same process for material orders in the service department. Before Assignar, information in forms needed to be shorter to send to the supplier. Larcon sends Assignar forms to suppliers, who can ship orders the next day.
Improved Cash Flow
Larcon doesn’t have a dispatcher. In the office, everyone answers the phone and creates work orders and schedules. Having a single source of truth to see where people and equipment are at any given time makes a huge difference, especially when everyone is spread out.
With Assignar, Larcon’s office team can see where ‘manpower’ is, what needs to be filled, and where equipment is at a glance.
Because Annice is the only one in the office that does the billing, it would often get overwhelming. However, since implementing Assignar, Brian says cash flow has improved significantly.
“Now that we have everything in one place, it makes it a lot easier for her to bill, which makes her more likely to do it regularly.
And that in itself means that we have cash rolling in on a regular basis.”
For Larcon, Brian says business is going really well. With many exciting projects coming up, Brian says that if they land all the projects they have bid on, they may double their sales this year.
