Edward’s Stone is a natural thin stone veneer company based in Lincoln, Nebraska, with showroom locations in Omaha, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Castle Rock, Colorado. The team builds and installs stone veneer for homes and commercial spaces across the region, work that depends on getting the small details right: the stone pattern a homeowner picked out, the staging materials waiting on site, the exact stage an install crew left off at.
Spreading that work across multiple locations means more hands touch every project. A salesperson walks the site first. An installation crew shows up weeks later. A project manager coordinates everything in between. And a homeowner wants a straight answer about where their project stands, right now, not after someone tracks down the crew.
When Edward’s Stone needed a better way to keep that chain of information intact, they partnered with CompanyCam.
The Problem: Answers That Lived Nowhere but a Text Thread
Before CompanyCam, Edward’s Stone ran project updates through iMessage. Crews texted photos to the office, project managers texted back, and everyone did their best to keep track of who said what about which job.
That worked until a project manager’s phone rang. Homeowners and contractors called wanting to know how far along their install was, and the answer often wasn’t there. Texts get scrolled past. Photos get buried. A conversation from three days ago about the driveway job disappears under a dozen newer messages about other projects, and details get lost in the shuffle.
The problems that created showed up across the business:
- Project managers couldn’t answer a homeowner’s question about job progress without calling the crew first
- Photos and updates got lost in a scrolling text thread the moment a new message came in
- Salespeople and project managers had to meet on site together just to stay aligned on a single project
- There was no consistent place to look back at what had already happened on a job
Cutting Response Time in Half with Real-Time Notifications
Matt Phelps, a project superintendent at Edward’s Stone, had heard about CompanyCam and thought it could solve the problem. With CompanyCam, every project photo lives in one place instead of scattered across phones and text threads, organized by job instead of by conversation.
The notifications made the biggest difference for Phelps day to day. “The best thing for us has been the notifications. When someone comments on a photo or lets you know about a different project, it pops up on your phone right away.”
That visibility changes how fast Phelps can respond. Instead of calling the field to find out where a job stands, he can check CompanyCam and have an answer ready before he hangs up. By his own account, it cuts his response time in half and gives him immediate answers for contractors and homeowners asking about a project.
Connecting Sales and Project Management Without a Site Visit
Coordinating between the sales team and the install crew used to mean physically meeting on site to compare notes. Colbi Ragon, a project manager at Edward’s Stone, sees CompanyCam as the fix for that handoff.
“CompanyCam is an excellent tool. It helps our salesmen connect with our project managers. Instead of them both meeting on site, we can refer back to the photos in CompanyCam and talk over the phone.”
Now a sales reps pre-job photos and a project manager’s progress updates sit in the same place. Neither person has to drive across town to compare what they’re each looking at. They can talk it through over the phone with the same photos in front of both of them, and if a job needs a more formal write-up, that same documentation can turn into a shareable project report instead of a separate email.
A Recommendation That Extends Beyond Stone Veneer
Phelps uses CompanyCam to document projects and communicate back with the office, and he says it makes the whole process easier because it cuts the time out of it. That experience is why he has recommended CompanyCam to contacts across other trades, including landscaping, general contracting, roofing, gutters, and siding.
The Case for CompanyCam
Growing across multiple locations meant Edward’s Stone needed every project manager, salesperson, and crew member working from the same information, no matter which showroom they were closest to. Texting photos back and forth couldn’t keep up with that.
CompanyCam gave Edward’s Stone a single place to document every job, notify the right person the moment something changes, and connect sales and project management without a drive across town. “I would definitely recommend,” Phelps said. For a team documenting stone veneer projects across Nebraska and Colorado, that recommendation is doing exactly what it should.
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