Timberland Exteriors has been serving the Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Detroit Lakes areas for over 20 years, specializing in siding, roofing, and windows. Owner Paul Trautmann came to the trades by accident — a former police officer who answered an ad for home improvement sales and never looked back.
What sets Timberland apart isn’t just the quality of their work. It’s their belief that contractors are in people’s homes, making a mess, and the least they can do is treat that with respect.
That philosophy demands transparency. Customers need to see what’s being done, why it costs what it costs, and proof that the work was completed the right way. For years, delivering on that promise was harder than it should have been — because the photo documentation process at Timberland was a mess.
The Problem: 30 to 40 Photos a Day With Nowhere to Go
When your crews are hitting three houses a day and taking 30 to 40 photos per job, organization breaks down fast. By the end of the week at Timberland, nobody could tell which photo belonged to which job. Photos ended up buried in email threads. City inspectors wanted documentation. Homeowners wanted copies. And the only system available was searching through inboxes hoping the right photo turned up.
The deeper problem was that the chaos was discouraging documentation altogether. Before CompanyCam, Timberland minimized the number of photos their crews took because keeping track of them was too cumbersome. Less documentation meant less proof, less transparency, and a harder conversation with every customer who had questions — a pattern that costs contractors hundreds of dollars per job more often than most realize.
From Avoiding Photos to 900 Per Job
Once Timberland started using CompanyCam, the number of photos they took on a job went from as few as possible to as many as needed. Today, a single job can have 900 photos. Every detail is captured — rotten wood, clearance issues, electrical boxes, installation steps — because the documentation is organized automatically by project and address the moment a photo is taken.
That shift changed how Paul’s crew communicates with customers entirely:
- Before the job: photos of existing conditions so customers understand what they’re paying for
- During the job: real-time progress photos crews don’t have to email back to the office
- After the job: a permanent photo record tied to the customer’s address that anyone can access at any time
- For disputes: timestamped evidence of exactly what was found and what was done
City inspectors, homeowners, and insurance carriers all get what they need without anyone having to hunt through an inbox. Building that standard across a crew starts with knowing the six photos every contractor should be taking on every job.
The Moment That Made It Real
The “aha” moment for Timberland’s crew didn’t come from the office — it came from the field. The first time Paul’s installers used CompanyCam, their reaction was immediate: “Finally. We don’t have to figure out how to get photos to you anymore. We just take photos and it’s done.”
That crew buy-in was the turning point. Onboarding a new employee takes about five minutes. They open the app, take their first photo at the job site, and CompanyCam automatically pulls up the right project based on their GPS location. They don’t even need to know the address — the system handles it, and the benefit is obvious from the very first tap.
How CompanyCam Changed the Customer Conversation
For Paul, the most valuable thing CompanyCam does is make transparency easy. When a customer gets an $8,000 bill, they want to know what they paid for. CompanyCam lets Paul show them every nail on every piece of rotten wood that was replaced — not just tell them about it.
Annotating photos takes that a step further — circling damage, adding arrows, dropping text directly on the image so the customer sees the issue and the explanation together. The tools Paul’s crew uses most:
- Arrows pointing to specific damage that’s hard to describe over the phone
- Text notes explaining why a repair was necessary before the work was covered up
- Circles around problem areas tied to line items on the estimate
- Annotated photos shared instantly without any additional setup
That level of detail justifies the price, builds trust, and eliminates the back-and-forth that slows down approvals and payments. Paul’s crew shares those photos through project timelines and galleries so clients have a running view of job progress and are never left wondering what’s happening on their property.
The Case for CompanyCam
The proof that CompanyCam works at Timberland isn’t a testimonial — it’s a story. During a remodel, the crew photographed so many steps that when electricians discovered they’d forgotten to connect the electrical to the main box after the drywall was up, the photos showed exactly where the connection point was. Instead of tearing out the wall, they cut a two-inch hole, made the connection, and moved on. That’s contractor liability protection built not from a policy but from a documentation habit.
Paul’s advice to contractors who are skeptical is simple: don’t take his word for it. “Call me,” he said. “I’ll tell you about my experience with CompanyCam.” After three years of using the app, he knows what he’d say. “CompanyCam is the best app we have ever found.”
