How Anderson Commercial Flooring Used Clearstory to Process and Close Change Orders Faster

About Anderson Flooring

Founded in 1954, Anderson Commercial Flooring is a third-generation, family-owned Specialty Contractor providing flooring and floor covering solutions to commercial construction clients across Northern California and working on marquee projects including Oakland Children's Hospital, San Francisco General Hospital, and the Google and LinkedIn headquarters buildings. 

Searching for a New Way to Surface and Communicate Change Orders

For three generations, Anderson Commercial Flooring has been delivering on a customer-first business mantra as the backbone of their broader company values. “We don’t push our agenda, we listen to our clients, and we try to determine the things that they want and the things that make their lives easier, all while being the best service provider out there for finished flooring,” explains company vice president Joe McKeown. 

But like many Specialty Contractors, Anderson found traditional approaches to capturing, communicating, and resolving out-of-contract work with clients lacked the professionalism and transparency necessary to be in sync with a customer-first mentality, and also put top-line revenue at risk.  

“The office didn’t know that there were changes going on until a foreman dropped off a booklet in the office with a week’s worth of T&M Tickets across five different jobs that we needed to process to get paid,”  McKeown says. “And then we’d be sitting in a room with our clients and a stack of Tickets worth $100K and trying to resolve our contract, sliding a bill across the table that they didn’t expect. It got to the point where you were basically gambling on what you could possibly get paid for extra work.” 

As Anderson continued to grow its network of clients across marquee projects in Northern California, McKeown and his team wanted a new way to surface and process Change Orders that matched the company’s professional approach to project execution and customer satisfaction, and adopted Clearstory to streamline Change Order communication and get CORs processed and paid faster for reduced revenue-at-risk and increased cash flow. 

“Change Orders cost money to process, and they always cost money up front. You need to spend the money before you get it back. It is a commitment to do the work, not always with the certainty that you’re going to be paid back,” McKeown said. 

Using Clearstory to Close Out CORs with GCs in Real-Time

Created by contractors to modernize how the industry communicates and resolves out-of-contract work, Clearstory provided Anderson with an easy, standardized way to log digital T&M Tickets with the home office and armed McKeown and the executive team with a cloud-based, shared COR log to collaborate with clients on resolving Change Orders quickly and professionally. 

“Our General Contractors love the transparency of the communication, and they’re impressed that we can make revisions and updates in real-time,” McKeown says. “We go through the Clearstory Change Order Log together, do mark-ups and edits, the client can make approvals, and we’re all watching the COR log get adjusted and cleared up live.”  

Anderson installers have quickly gravitated to Clearstory as a better way for recording and communicating field-directed extra work, and with a ridiculously easy user interface and a streamlined focus on Change Order communication, Clearstory provided Anderson with a plug and play Change Order upgrade.

“Clearstory doesn't take a long time to learn because it was built by people who understand labor, materials, the dollars and cents of Change Orders, and hitting all the basics that help you capture your exposure. As soon as you set your jobs up in Clearstory, you're going to see a huge increase in efficiency and a huge decrease in the back and forth that leads to rejected Change Orders.”

Joe McKeown

Vice President, Anderson Commercial Flooring

Protecting Revenue and Powering New Business Growth

At Anderson, that increase in COR processing time and resolution has had a significant impact on top-line revenue. In 16 months, the company has processed almost $20 million worth of change cost with Clearstory, and is getting upwards of 70 percent of those costs repaid without the need for tedious and tenuous close-out negotiations.  

McKeown says Clearstory helps to remove the negative stigma associated with Change Orders and enables Anderson to approach change events as an opportunity to support client requests and provide outstanding customer service, all of which is leading to new avenues of business with customers new and old.  

“From my perspective as vice president, Clearstory raises the bar of who you work with and how you hold yourself,” McKeown says. “We’ve grown this year to about $80 million in revenue. If we didn’t have Clearstory, we’d have less clients looking at us the way they do now in terms of our professionalism and the way we carry ourselves.”