What's the ROI on BuildWitt Training?

Let’s get right to it: the ROI you’ll get on BuildWitt Training depends on how you use it.  

To get a better idea of your potential ROI, let’s look at the typical ROI on construction training in general. Then, we’ll discuss factors that can affect your ROI with BuildWitt Training. 

We’ll also share the ROI our customers expect—in other words, how they’ll know BuildWitt Training is working for them.

Let’s get started.

What’s the typical ROI on training?

A recent study from the Construction Industry Institute (CII) found that for every 1% of their labor budget that contractors spent on training, they got the following returns: 

ROI on Training

Now, these results were for construction companies. Other Dirt World industries, like mining or tunneling, could see different results because of the nature of their work.

It’s also important to remember that in any industry, you may get different results. This study gives us an average—not a guarantee. Your ROI could be lower or higher.  

Next, we’ll cover several factors that can affect your ROI on BuildWitt Training. 

What factors affect your ROI on BuildWitt Training? 

Your ROI isn’t a fixed number. There’s no formula that says, “If you spend $XX,000 on BuildWitt Training, you’ll make exactly $XXX,000 in revenue.” 

Instead, your ROI is what you make it.

That’s a double-edged sword. It can be intimidating to invest money, time, or effort without knowing the exact payoff you’ll get. But you can do things to make your ROI bigger and better. 

Here are three ways you can increase your ROI on BuildWitt Training. 

1. Make sure your team engages

Have you ever bought food for your kids (or yourself) that you just threw away because nobody ate it? That was a waste of money. 

That’s basically what happens if you buy BuildWitt Training and no one uses it. You’re paying for the product, but it’s not helping you. 

To get the best ROI on BuildWitt Training, make sure your team uses it. They need to watch the lessons, do the quizzes, and view any custom content you upload. 

Here are some tips to help you encourage engagement: 

Roll out BuildWitt Training to a test group

They’ll be the first ones in your company to try it, and they’ll give you feedback about what’s helpful and how they want to use this tool. Include foremen and field supervisors—when they see the value, they’ll encourage their crews to use the app, too.

Give leaders ownership

You can set your field leaders as Group Leaders in the app, so they can assign lessons to their specific crew, track their progress, and get their people the right training at the right time.

Ask questions

Your people are a gold mine of information. What's their feedback for you? For us? When they know you value their input, they’re much more likely to engage.

Track your people’s progress

The Analytics dashboard in the training app shows you what content people are engaging with. You can also track who’s training and who’s not—so you can reward top performers and encourage others to dive in.

2. Use BuildWitt Training to supplement other training

You’ve gotten this far as a company for a reason. So keep what’s working for you!

BuildWitt Training exists to enhance what you’re already doing and make it easier to share and store your way of working. 

It can also be the foundation for you to build a training program if you don’t have one yet. But it shouldn’t be your only training tool.

Training takes many forms—like field training, toolbox talks, and classroom instruction. You’ll get an even better ROI if you use BuildWitt Training to enhance these other types of training.

That’s because training in more platforms helps your crew stay engaged and retain the material. Plus, they’ll get to try what they’ve learned hands-on in the field. 

So, how can you use BuildWitt Training as a supplement?

Upgrade your toolbox talks

Let’s face it: toolbox talks are often boring and have low participation. Having the crew watch a lesson together before or during toolbox talks can start the conversation and help them apply what they’ve learned right away. There’s even a learning plan to help leaders enhance their toolbox talks.

Make field training easier and safer

Trying to teach new skills on the job can be difficult and dangerous. With the BuildWitt Training app, your crews can access the lessons they need to stay safe and do their jobs right there in the field. So your new pipelayer can brush up on trench safety before they climb into a real trench. Or your operators can watch lessons on machine walkarounds, then immediately practice on real machines. 

Start conversations in the classroom

Classroom training is often just a lecture. That’s boring! Instead, try using a BuildWitt Training video as a conversation starter; it can be a great supplement to your existing content. Or, watch a lesson at the end of the class to sum up what your crew has learned.

3. Share your own content

Did this one make you sweat? It shouldn’t! 

You don’t need to be a Hollywood producer to make great training content. But you do need to create and share your own content.

Why? Because your company has a unique culture and processes. You need to share your unique way of working with your people—especially new hires who are learning what success looks like at your company.

And while we’ve got over 800 preloaded videos and counting, our customers say that creating their own content is really the icing on the cake that makes BuildWitt Training a great tool for them. 

Learn more about creating and uploading your own content in BuildWitt Training.

What ROI can you expect from BuildWitt Training?

Like we said, we can’t guarantee you a specific ROI on BuildWitt Training. BuildWitt Training launched in the spring of 2022, so our customers are still discovering how it’s helping them. 

After all, the ROI on any kind of training doesn’t happen overnight. As Kevin Wolfe at Haydon Bridge Company put it, “It will take time . . . before we'll start seeing the true benefit.”

But our customers do believe those benefits will happen—and many are already seeing exciting, positive results. Here’s how they say they’ll know BuildWitt Training is paying off for their teams. 

More efficient training

One of the quickest wins our customers get from BuildWitt Training is that it helps them make training more efficient—and therefore, more effective. 

Training from anywhere

In today’s Dirt World, teams are often spread out across multiple states or even time zones. You can’t come together to train. It just isn’t practical or affordable. Neither is sending a trainer to every job site. Costs can quickly add up as you pay that trainer for travel, instruction time, and compliance checks. 

As the VP of Civil and Infrastructure at Wayne Brothers, Jim Rhodes wanted to help his spread-out teams train like they’re together, even when they’re not.

He said, “When I first started at Wayne Brothers, there weren't many of us. We all kind of got together in a basement . . . And now we're so spread out, it's hard to do that anymore. The BuildWitt platform was our attempt to get us all back in that same room again.”

And so far, it’s worked out pretty well.

Jim added, “What we've realized is this doesn't replace in-person training. But what it does is it does connect us, and once you have momentum around that connection, people talk . . . And if you build the content the right way, it reinforces the in-person training that you're doing.”

That’s especially important because spread-out teams need a standardized training experience. You don’t want Foreman A teaching crews something different than Foreman B. 

With BuildWitt Training, everyone’s watching the same lesson and learning the same thing across all job sites.

Taking less time out of the field

People take their phones everywhere. So when you’ve got an app like BuildWitt Training, they can access their training material right in the field. 

That means you’ll spend less time pulling your crew out of the field for classroom training. And that’s a huge money saver. 

Classroom training costs add up because you have to shut down production and pay your employees to sit in the training when they could be out in the field working.

But if you use BuildWitt Training to help keep your crew in the field, you can cut down those costs. In fact, BuildWitt Training can potentially pay for itself in terms of classroom savings alone.

Here’s an example from our CFO here at BuildWitt and former owner of Blount Contracting, Randy Blount, based on numbers from the Construction Financial Management Association.³

In construction, you can easily generate $30,000 in monthly revenue per employee. So for eight employees, that’s $240,000 in monthly revenue. Of that, 30-45% is likely equipment and labor consumables. 

Here’s what happens when you pull eight employees out of the field for training:

Whether those employees are eight of your top foremen or they're your whole crew, that's a lot of money to lose due to downtime.

Now we're not saying you should never train in a classroom. Classroom instruction is an essential part of any good training curriculum. However, you can use BuildWitt Training to help you find a more cost-efficient balance between classroom and field training.

Check out our pricing calculator to see how much BuildWitt Training will cost for you and get a better idea of what your ROI could be.

Less time spent on training

When you do get people into the classroom, it may not be as efficient as you hoped.

The Director of Safety and Employee Development at Evergreen Siteworks spent a lot of time training people in the classroom. 

He told us, “It was like I was getting them when I could, and I was giving as much information as I could . . . I'd have to have somebody in a room for like two hours to feel like I got enough data in front of them to make it worth it.” 

With BuildWitt Training, he said, “They can accomplish that same goal in 30 minutes’ time in everybody's hands throughout the entire company.”

Training retention

Sometimes trying to train people can feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall because they just don’t remember stuff. 

That’s not because your employees are lazy, stupid, or untrainable. It’s because most training in the Dirt World is unengaging and hard to remember. 

BuildWitt Training is designed to help your people retain the info so they can use it. 

Joe Sylvester, the GPS/Special Projects Manager at Bachtel Excavating, said, “You shouldn't have to tell the guy, ‘Hey, don't forget to grab the level off the truck’ or ‘Don't forget to put the ladder in that hole.’ You know, that’s safety right there. The growth you're looking for is to not have to remind the guy, not have to constantly train a guy.”

The President of Kingsway Services, Nick Pickrel, added, “BuildWitt Training is a way that . . . we can invest once in how to run the paver. And then .  . . we've captured it, you know? We don't have to do it 50 times.” 

Teaching leaders how to train

Most field leaders are used to doing the work—not training others. 

Ryan Delozier, President of Geotex Construction Services, said, “We've got a foreman [who uses] hardcore old school process . . . One thing he's always harped on is like, ‘We need better people.’ But he's not the greatest trainer.”

Eventually, that foreman started using BuildWitt Training himself. “Once he's in there, he loves it. He’s been watching videos,” Ryan said. 

So not only was that foreman learning new leadership skills, but he could also share BuildWitt Training with his crew. Ryan had high hopes that when this foreman needed to train a crew member, “He could just tell him, ‘Hey, go watch this video.’” 

Kevin added, “My hope would be we get to the level where the project manager is assigning content to his projects based on the tasks they're doing at the time.” 

That way, project managers can give their people three to five-minute refreshers on tasks they haven’t done in a while—which helps prevent mistakes and rework. 

People growth

Joe called BuildWitt Training “an investment in your company . . . You should see growth with the people who are being trained.”

And that’s one of the biggest reasons people buy BuildWitt Training. 

As Ryan put it, “We invest in our people. The better they do their jobs, the more money we make in theory, and then everybody benefits from that—not just an owner or a board.” 

Check out these people growth ROIs you can get with BuildWitt Training.

Individual growth

At Evergreen, BuildWitt Training is "an individual growth app. It's an ability for someone to grow from within, build their character, figure out their own values, figure out what they care about and what they want to do.”

Promotions from within

Many companies struggle to fill their leadership pipeline. Nick hopes BuildWitt Training will help him solve that problem at Kingsway Services.

They’re putting together a roadmap to help crew members know what they need to learn to become foremen. And they’re watching to see who’s using that roadmap.

“We're going to watch to see which of these guys is taking initiative to learn leadership . . . You know, who just went through the foreman class? Oh, it's the guy who’s only been here a month. And he's okay, so then we need to tell our foreman, ‘Hey, you should go invest in him because he's interested. He's hungry,’” Nick explained.

“So for go-getters—really people who want to learn—we want to have something available for them,” added Travis McLeod, HR/H&S Manager at Birnam Excavating.

New hire onboarding

You know you need to get new hires up to speed fast. But you also need to equip them to do their jobs properly and safely—especially as you hire people who are new to the industry.

That’s where quality onboarding comes into play.

Travis said in the past, “I just sent [new hires] a bunch of documents, got them to come in and sign some papers, read through our handbooks and stuff like that.” Now, he wants to use BuildWitt Training to help with orientations.

Our customers can use our course catalog to help them choose learning plans that will teach their new hires the basics about the industry, safety, professionalism, and their role.

Takeaways

The typical ROI is an 11% increase in productivity for every 1% of their labor budget that contractors spend on training. Turnover, absenteeism, rework, and injuries normally decrease from 14-26%.⁴

That said, your ROI is never a set number with BuildWitt Training—or any training tool, for that matter. Instead, it is what you make it. 

You can increase your ROI with BuildWitt Training by:

• Making sure your team engages 
• Using it to supplement other training 
• Sharing your own content 

Our customers chose BuildWitt Training because they expect a good ROI in terms of making training more efficient and helping people grow. And over time, all those “intangibles” will start showing up in the numbers. 

Want to learn more? These resources will help you out: 

• See how your peers are using BuildWitt Training.
• Learn how to calculate your ROI for training management in general.

Or, chat with a sales rep to request a live demo. They’ll help you learn how BuildWitt Training can help you level up your people and your business, and they’ll get you access to try BuildWitt Training for free.