Using Incentives to Build a More Productive (and Happy) Workforce with Sarah Buchner of Trunk Tools

Want to know how managing incentives increases productivity? In this episode of PayPod, host Jacob Hollabaugh sits down with Sarah Buchner of Trunk Tools to discuss how managing incentives can shift your workforce. Trunk Tools is an innovative construction fintech startup. Watch this episode for a fun and interesting dive into this latest development in payments and fintech. 

Payments & Fintech Insights In This Episode

Today’s Guest

Sarah Buchner : Trunk Tools

Trunk Tools is an innovative construction fintech startup solving the skilled labor shortage by enabling project leaders to increase workforce productivity, safety and profitability by aligning incentives from top to bottom, encouraging efficiency and positively motivating the workforce.

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About PayPod

PayPod is the leading voice in the payments and fintech industry, covering payments, risk management and new technology. Host Jacob Hollabaugh interviews leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world, as they discuss the latest developments in the payments and fintech industry.

Episode Transcript

Jacob: Welcome to PayPod, the Payments Industry podcast. Each week, we’ll bring you in-depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world, from payment processing to risk management and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place. Hello everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh, and today on the show we are going to be discussing incentives and how they can be used to build yourself a more productive workforce. And of course, since this is a payments and fintech focused program, you can bet that most of those incentives were going to be touching on have to do with money. I am joined to discuss these topics and more by Sarah Buchner, founder and CEO at Trunk Tools, the construction fintech startup who has set out to solve the skilled labor shortage. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Sarah: Thanks for having me.

Jacob: Absolutely. The pleasure is mine. Let’s before we dive into the company and the industry and everything, can you give us just a little background on who you are, what you were doing prior to launching Trunk Tools and then how the idea for the company came about?

Sarah: Yeah, of course. Usually people ask me who I am. I just say I’m a carpenter because, like, deep inside me, that’s what I am. I started my career as a carpenter when I was 12 years old because I come from a very poor background and whatever. My family had to give up the farm. And then like my dad was a carpenter. So long story short, he took me out on a construction site when I was 12 and I started working pretty much full time as a carpenter. So blue collar by background and then work my way up in construction, have been in and around construction for 20 years and eventually I was running like large high risk projects with like 600 guys on the job and one of them died on a construction site. And at the same time I was finishing up my PhD in data science, computer science, civil engineering. So kind of like construction tech. And I was like, Hey, we can use software to help these people out there and to, you know, see less people die. And that was the first product that I started building. And from there on I switched from actually construction to construction tech or to software and have built several tools in Europe and eventually heard about the Promised Land, Silicon Valley and the Land of the Free. And I was like, okay, how do I get there? And so my path ended up at Stanford Business School because I needed a visa and the network to start another company in the US.

Sarah: And at Stanford I was looking a lot into what are the real issues currently in construction and what can we do? And my research showed that the biggest problem is the labor shortage. There’s just not enough people who are willing to work. There’s not enough people who actually consider construction a career path. And without going into any political background or societal questions around that, we learned that it’s really hard to get more people into the industry. So we realized that the only short term solution there’s long term solutions like robotics and automation, but that’s 20 years out. So the only short term solutions are finding more people or getting more out of the people and finding more people is what we started with upskilling, reskilling. We failed. And I wish everybody good luck out there who tries that. But it’s very unscalable business models. And so we pivoted over towards, hey, we need to get more out of existing workforces. And the way to do that is increasing productivity. And interestingly, construction is the least productive industry in the world with about 20% productivity rate. So 12 minutes out of the hour and they do value adding work. You’re laughing me to mean.

Jacob: Yeah. And I’m sure everyone listening has some idea at the moment. You say construction. There definitely is a bit of a stereotype that maybe is true based on those stats of seeing the site and seeing a few people working, a few people not or what have you. And so hearing an actual number put to it like that definitely just was like, Oh wow, okay, that’s a low productivity number for sure.

Sarah: Yeah. Next time you’re in a traffic jam, you know you’re based in Chicago, but you have traffic jams everywhere and you like go slowly, five miles per hour next to a construction site. And you look out there and you see four people standing around and one working. That’s your 20% productivity right there. And it’s not really because these guys or girls are lazy or they don’t want to work. It’s like it’s like a structural issue in the industry. So we set out to solve the labor shortage by increasing productivity, because if you increase productivity, you need less labor. And what we learned in our research is that there’s completely misaligned incentives. So when you build a house or you’re willing to pay your general contractor like more money to finish earlier or to build a better quality. So the general contractor is incentivized to do the right thing, the subcontractor is incentivized to do the right thing. And when it comes to the actual people working, those people are paid per hour. So there’s a huge gap just in like what they think about and what they care about. Because if I get paid per hour, which I obviously don’t as a founder, but if I would get paid per hour, all I care about is showing up ten hours a day and actually dragging out the project. What I do not care about is getting it done early and actually losing out potentially more hours, which is not the case right now because there’s so much work. So what we decided to do is to start an incentive software that aligns incentives for the actual workforce with the ones from the owners or contractors and their employers.

Jacob: Yeah. Wow. There’s a lot of different follow ups there. One quick tangent aside about the former company or former efforts, as you said, good luck to those still trying. But on the labor shortage side of things, I know you’ve moved over to the other, but just as a quick out of curiosity is the reason that it was not really doable to get the shortage of people increased because of fears of people being like it’s a dying industry because of robotics or anything, and like it’s not a long term solution or what was maybe the main hurdle or reason why just increasing the number of workers wasn’t ever going to be feasible.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s a great question. So what we learned, we did very few fans targeted marketing for like a sub area of Texas, like in both languages and so on. And we tried to get Uber drivers to become construction workers and we told them, Hey, you do a two week like two hours a day online training, everything is for free and so on. You can do it flexible whenever you want to. And we will double your salary. But that was the promise. It was like you show me whatever you made, I will double it if you do two weeks of online training, two hours a day. We had 600 people sign up within a few weeks and we only had five people fulfilled the first day of training.

Jacob: Oh, my goodness. That is yeah, that is shocking.

Sarah: And then we went back, right? And we were like, okay, let’s interview these people. And we paid them for these interviews and we’re like, Hey, can you tell us why that was the training that bad? Like, is it a product issue or is it a market issue? And what we learned is that most of the people we try to move over were just thinking very short term. They were like, Hey, I’m actually okay with my current state. I’m good with my job. I can survive. I can’t really think about something that might help me in half a year. So what we learned from research is pretty much the marshmallow experiment, right? There’s people who are driven by instant gratification and there’s people who are driven by delayed gratification. And I assume you and me, I’m definitely I’m a founder. It’s all delayed gratification or potentially never gratification. But that’s my job. What we see with a lot of blue collar work is they don’t go to school because they don’t understand delayed gratification. And so that resulted to our incentive product where we’re like, Hey, if you do something today and you do a great job, you want the money, the extra bonus on this day. And that’s really what led to Trunk Tools as it is today.

Jacob: Yeah, amazing. And you did a wonderful job of already expected to ask why this industry specifically and how big the inefficiency gap was between others. But you already laid that out for us. Well, so you’ve started to give the layout of what Trunk Tools is and the different services you offer. But can you walk me through just the high level, the different services that you offer and then if possible, on the incentive side to go through maybe a hypothetical example of how those incentives work and what it actually looks like in action?

Sarah: Yeah. As a broader company vision, we set out to help the labor shortage, but help these blue collar workers in general. And again, like I’m lacking a better term that we usually use the term deskless workforce. So when we talk about deskless workforce in construction, we’re talking about 5 to 6% of the American population. These 5 or 6% do not use any software products for the day to day job. Just like wrap your mind around it, all we do is sit in front of a computer and the people who build the roof on our head are using software to do that job. I’m not talking about managers, right? Like managers use Procore and Autodesk and that’s all great, but the actual workforce is only text messages and phone calls. And so everything we build is based on this theory of like, Hey, let’s keep it in a way that they understand it, which is text message. So everything we build is text message based. They don’t need to download anything. They don’t need to learn a new tool. It’s just what they use to working with anyways. And to give an example. So the first product is an incentive software. We automatically digest construction data, project data, and then we have algorithms that suggest the right incentives for the right person at the right time. That’s all done automatically. And so as Steel Crew, for example, we do a lot of crew based because it’s better for my psychology perspective. A crew base will get a text message saying, Hey, finish this sequence of steel by Thursday instead of Friday, everybody gets an extra $100. And these workers are like, Oh, cool. Like, I can do this one day earlier and then make an extra 100 bucks. They go out, they work, and as soon as they finished on Thursday, they instantly get paid out on these debit cards. So every worker has their personalized debit card and the money flows on Thursday evening. As soon as they’re done, they drive home. They can pay for their gas with the extra $100.

Jacob: Yeah. Wow. That’s amazing. And we’re going to come back to the debit cards and the kind of financial side of things, of course, in in a few minutes. But first, obviously, the benefits to the company here are that the efficiency of their workforce goes way, way up. Are what kind of from the employee side of things is the benefit just simply you know, they’re they’re going to make more money if they partake in this or are there other benefits to the company or to the employee that we haven’t listed out here?

Sarah: Yeah. Meaning construction. You can never only do productivity, it’s always combined with safety and quality. So we incentivize safety, quality and productivity. It’s just the productivity one is the easiest to explain. So we have seen safety go way up on the construction sites we’re working with, which is obviously an incentive for everybody involved. We have also seen happiness go up because the workers feel more fulfilled with the day to day job. Right. It’s not just construction historically. You get yelled at if you don’t do a good job. Right. It’s a lot of stick. It’s a lot of negativity. And so we’re moving from stick to carrot and we’re like, Hey, actually, I’m not going to yell at you if you don’t finish by Thursday, but you’re losing out on $100. And so then people can come home, they get different tears. It’s a little bit like Uber drivers, right? It’s like, Hey, I got five new stars today for my job, right? I got the second tier they can compare. And so there’s overall just more high retention because people are happier because they feel ownership of their work.

Jacob: Yeah. So you’re essentially monetizing to do lists or monetizing project management. Really? Are there anyone else out there doing this or are you kind of the first of your kind that’s taking this because there’s obviously project management softwares, maybe, I don’t know, you could speak to within the construction business how prevalent they are or not. But definitely in the last 5 to 10 years, especially the last five years, all across everyone I work with, every new client I work with, it’s like, well, we use Slack or we use Trello or Asana or this, that or the other. Like everyone’s got their project management tool, none of which add the element of monetizing it the way yours does. So do you know of anyone? Did you have any kind of model to go off of? Were you possibly incorporating anything from the like world of all the project management apps into how you built this? Or was it simply like it needs to be on phones and text messages like you said, and it needs to be offering financial incentive.

Sarah: It evolves. So we’re completely free. So I haven’t seen anybody. But if you find somebody or if somebody who’s listening to this knows someone, please let me know. We started with just being on construction sites like texting people, Venmo ING, people like just like really like like gift cards, like really just trying to prove the concept. And then we were like, slowly, slowly developing to what it is right now. What there is, is a lot of companies in manufacturing and construction have actually done the piecework, like piecework. People do not get paid hourly rate. They just get paid per output. We know that this is has a lot of pros and cons. And so what we learn from that is we took the pros, which is the psychology piece out of it, and the ownership piece and the happiness. And we eliminated the cons, which is like forcing people to they will only get paid if they produce output. For us, it’s different. Like they get the base salary, but they get like the perks if they perform better or perform safer. So I think we learned from that. Yeah, there’s not really there’s like like 1 or 2 other companies who do this with like points almost more like Amex, credit card points. We just know that 78% of the blue collar workers in construction live paycheck to paycheck. So if you are struggling, four out of five people struggle to meet their family’s needs every week. They don’t care about points and they don’t care about another flat screen TV or like companies, they care about cash today to actually pay or put some food on their family’s table. So we knew that cash was the way to go.

Jacob: Certainly cash is king, especially for it comes up a lot. And as we’re going to get into speed of payments here in a moment, and every time we talk about that, that is the main refrain in statistics like the one you just shared of that. A lot of people sometimes forget that even their own team members, their own employees and whatnot are living in a way where, yes, it matters to them how fast they can get that. Every little bit helps. Every week matters everything like that last thing on this before we kind of get into some of the financial stuff then or two things. One, it sounds like. So is there any sort of like you have to accept something like this when offered to you or I think you laid out like you’re getting your base no matter what you already have, you know what project you’re working on, what you’re meant to be doing. These are strictly add on incentives on top that it’s if you would like or if you are able to do it in this manner, either more safely, faster, etcetera, etcetera, you can get this extra incentive. Is it something they have to like accept up front when they get the text message or are required to or are employers allowed to require like, Hey, if we send you this, it’s kind of like an update to what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s not a this is an incentive. It’s like a this needs to be done by then now and we change the price. How does that kind of work now?

Sarah: And we’re very careful at companies that work with us. Don’t do that. That’s why we create these incentives. So it is really a every employee can opt into that or opt out of the program completely. Obviously, everybody so far has opted in because it’s free. Additional money, right? Free. And then for every new incentive that is coming in, like their team manager has to like say yes or no so they can push back. Theoretically, most of the time it’s just very clear because again, like we use AI to drive these incentives so we can only know what works and what doesn’t work and we create a win win situation, right? The employer saves money because of the increase in safety and productivity and quality and the employee makes more money. Our top performers right now make $2,000 more net a month.

Jacob: Wow. Amazing. And I would assume the better data that you have to work off of the more people you work with and roll these things out to your dad is going to get better and better and you’re only going to be able to provide an even more ideal breakdown of these are the incentives for this type of project and everything. So it’s pretty amazing to think of where it could go with how effective it already is proving to be. You’re in construction right now, but I was kind of leading to this earlier. My question is anyone else doing this? This does seem like while construction with those efficiency numbers you shared earlier was the most ripe for needing something like this. It does seem like something that could be applied to most any industry, like in theory, Right. So do you have any idea of we would one day like we’ve proven the concept at some point we would take it outside of the walls of construction. And if so, maybe other industries who you might have thought of like are the most ready to adopt something like this, or maybe where construction is of really inefficient a tool like this, a setup like this would really work well in a different industry.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. We got to drag the pulled into manufacturing. So now we’re also doing manufacturing right now and we just get pulled a lot right now into agriculture, which is not necessarily a market that we had, you know, a top 3 or 4 market list, but because of the huge pull. And also, again, we really trying to help the workers here. And when you think about agriculture workers, I think from a gut feeling, it’s even worse than in construction from like all sorts of problems that they have. So I feel like being able to get money quickly to this part of society is super important and it would actually help agriculture a lot. So we exploring that. On the other hand, right, we are an early stage startup. We’re not going to spread ourselves too thin like so I can only raise that much capital at one point. So we are trying to focus out, go to market still mostly on construction manufacturing, but we exploring some of their related markets.

Jacob: Yeah, certainly glad to hear this. Definitely a smart approach. There’s all all the big investors in the magical Silicon Valley. I think as you refer to it earlier. But yeah, you don’t want to don’t want to try to do everything all at once and then not be able to end up actually doing the one thing really well and then spreading it out. So we’ve talked enough about the alluded to the financial aspects and the speed of money and everything. So let’s get into a little bit of the financial portion of this. A couple of the other services you offer, like you offer per diem reimbursement and earned wage access where they can get their earnings a lot faster and an immediate payment, which we touched on earlier, that is super duper important for the vast majority of people within these types of workforces. Both of those operate on the benefit of speed the employee wants repaid or paid instantly the moment they’ve earned or are owed that money. What is it that we haven’t maybe touched on already about speed and ease of access that makes it such a standout benefit that makes it such a key driver of the success of products like yours.

Sarah: Yeah, a third of the at least based on the data that we saw, a third of the blue collar workers in construction are unbanked right now. So obviously there’s yeah, there’s like the banking, the unbanked piece, which investors love and I think it’s the right thing to do. So when you do not have access to any kind of banking product, whatever else we offer will get a lot of traction. So we are thinking about offering just more financial products on top of our existing offering right now. And so we’re working mostly on that. I can’t tell you too much details because there might some Y Combinator companies jumping on us right now. But you know what?

Jacob: I’m certainly well, one that I’m guessing we can talk a little about is that debit card that you flashed earlier. So everything you’re paying out through any of them per diem, earned wage access incentives, anything is being paid out to a Trunk Tools branded visa debit card. I’m correct on that so far. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So that’s my understanding. You’re not actually handling any of the money yourself. You’re not a bank yourself, but you work with an FDIC insured institution. Was there ever any thought or maybe this is getting back into areas you might not be as able to talk about, but is there was there ever any thought of like we should be our own bank? Or if not, if it was like, we want to leave that portion of it to someone who already does that, what were you looking for and kind of needing in a banking partner to make your side of the offer work?

Sarah: I know the things I’m good at and I know the things I’m good at. I never want it to be a fintech. That wasn’t what I set out to do. I wanted to help construction and the construction workforce. We accidentally became a fintech because it was the right solution for our customers. We didn’t initially have these debit cards. We didn’t initially build out the whole system that we have now. But we were kind of like dragged into it by our customer feedback. So I we made that decision every six months about like, should we be our own bank? Should we should we go directly? Right now, we’re not doing that. And I don’t think the upset right now is worth the investment.

Jacob: So everything exclusively has to run through that branded debit card that you pay out, correct?

Sarah: Yeah, that’s more questions run through because we pay out within microseconds. And in order to do that, you need to own the banking. The money flow needs to go through you. And so that’s the way to do it. Yeah. Without like crypto or online banks or anything that like my customers and users would not approve or understand and I don’t want to put them in a position where they get some cryptocurrencies and two days later the money is worth 50% of what it was before.

Jacob: Yeah, certainly. And it’s pretty fascinating to think of one. I really love that you said you come to this. You didn’t ever mean to be in the world of finance or a fintech, that you were doing this to help a group of people who you had worked your whole life with and around love seeing that, and I love that. That has become a bit of a theme in a lot of the people that we’ve spoken to and kind of proving out something. I believe that when you actually do put people first and like end users first and really want them to have the benefits that the success of the company and money and everything for the company and things will follow that. So I love hearing that. That’s kind of where you started and what the real true goal is. But the second thing that’s really kind of fascinating is this idea that you’re working with folks who are not the most tech savvy or don’t desire to be the most tech savvy, like you said, like we didn’t use text messages only because that’s what they were used to and that’s what they wanted to continue using. They didn’t want to have to get a new device and download apps or anything like that. So you’re finding a way to bridge this gap from a consumer base and a customer base who doesn’t want really to use any of new tech futuristic type things with a world that is frankly kind of the leaders in like all the finance world is really tech forward and all this new type of stuff. So to be able to bridge that gap is pretty amazing. That from the outside it would be like that doesn’t really seem possible that you could get this group that doesn’t want to use those things, connect it to all these things that are over across that line they don’t want to use. So what’s been the most eye opening part or maybe the most gratifying part in being able to bridge that gap and build that connection between those two groups?

Sarah: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that these people necessarily don’t want to use that. Right. It’s just it has never been part of their job. They haven’t been trained on using that. Those people use software in their personal life. Right? It’s not like that. They live behind like the moon and like like they’ve never had a smartphone in their life. I see them sometimes see the most modern iPhones on construction sites because they actually, like some of them in some certain states, make a decent amount of money. They all use text messaging or use WhatsApp or they’re on Facebook there and stuff like that. So they know how to use it, but they’re just not used to using any kind of software in their job and get a lot of. What was most surprising is throughout my last ten years. Of being in this world in construction software. Is that a lot? There’s a lot of frustration by these people who are younger or who are more tech savvy and are like, Why do I have to work with no blueprints on paper? Or why do I have to fill in like a tape on a piece of paper? Why do I have to scan? There’s so many paper based processes and I feel like the first wave of innovation and construction was like digitizing paper processes, which was already like a big success.

Sarah: And it was like plangrid and some of these companies. It was a big success because there was nothing like empty field. And I think back then, now we are like in the next kind of wave where we actually think about like structurally, how can we change how these industry work to make a better experience for everybody? I think what I’m most excited about right now is actually there’s a lot of open mindedness around artificial intelligence. And it’s funny, construction is not a hype place ever, right? Like the whole world is hype around this construction is actually very down to earth. It’s just the kind of characters that are around and they’re like, okay, like, I don’t care if you call a day, I want to see what it can do. And he showed them what it can do, and they’re like, okay, cool. Like that helps us. Let’s do it. It’s like very little fear, actually, when you provide real, like, real benefits to them.

Jacob: Yeah, they like if they can be shown the true practical advantage to them, they’re happy to be like, Yes, if that’s going to work, if that’s what it can do, then we want that because that makes our lives easier or better or safer. Et cetera. Et cetera. So very cool. Has there been anything that has been super eye opening or frustrating or kind of a big hurdle to overcome from entering this world of finance that you have said you didn’t ever plan to be or necessarily even want to be in a fintech or in the world of finance. Is there anything you’ve learned about operating in that world that stood out as kind of a big surprise to you?

Sarah: I think it’s shocking to me how many fintechs are purely relying on interchange and float. It’s mind blowing. It’s like we have that as well. It’s just such a small chunk of our revenue. And I was like, Wow, we never charged a Google workers like ever. It’s a company policy. So like all we build, we make money from the enterprises. But was like, even if I made this completely for free and only for the work because like all I would rely on is interchange and float. And it was like, that is just really hard Like, and I respect everybody who does this, and especially people who pull it off because I love revenue. And it was like, I don’t know how you guys do that. So I think that’s the biggest one I’ve learned about fintech, like Chapo, who trumps that bridge?

Jacob: Yeah, well, I’m right there with you because we talk to a lot of different folks doing a lot of different things on this show. But the ones that are kind of most reliant on that, I definitely kind of have my fingers crossed for the most of like that’s a it’s a very tricky way to operate and it’s kind of incentivizing a race to the bottom more or less on the margins of all of that. And so definitely right there with you on that, you referenced AI a few times and at the beginning we kind of talked about the data sets that you’re using to create this incentive structure. So the final question or two here to get you out on is how how much better do you think your service is going to get over time? The more you’re able to actually get in and get more and more people through the program using your tools so that your data set can get bigger and bigger. And are you asking, are you only bringing like your own historical data to a new client that you’re working with? Or are you going to people and asking them to be able to provide some of their own internal data back to work with maybe a mixture of the two? How does that side of things kind of work.

Sarah: That I’m like an Italian grandmother. I’m not going to tell you my sex secret sauce recipe. But yeah, I think to answer the first question of like, how much better can this be? We see such a rapid development internally, but also like in the market of like what is actually possible with large language models, with some of the other tools that are coming on the market. We have been working in and around the eyes for many years. And again, I’m not a big hype person, so I’m not like like now there’s there’s one thing like AI has been around. It’s getting way better. It’s getting more accessible. I think that’s the big change that’s happening right now. And I think we’ll see a lot of improvement in a lot of different areas, not just construction, fintech, where people can just build quick smart tools that help us organize and automate some of these processes and some of the data streams as well. So I think that’s my answer. We see like like the big update from my team every two weeks and the numbers are just like getting so much better. And that’s in a two week cycle. With the new versions coming out, the two weeks will go down to like one week to a few days. And just like the speed and the acceleration of what’s happening is mind blowing. And that’s what I’m excited about.

Jacob: Yeah. In our your clients like working exclusively off of your recommendations. Are they allowed to kind of have the flexibility to design their own if they come to you and like we want to hear all of your recommendations, tell us everything you know. But also I already know that I would love to be able to offer this incentive. I just I’m confident this would work. Are they allowed to kind of design on their own, on their end, or is it simply like if you come to us, you’re going to take kind of exclusively our recommendations and those are what’s going to be rolled out.

Sarah: Yeah, we actually started with more providing the infrastructure of giving them the ability to do whatever they want. And then we learn from customer feedback that they’re actually struggling with, like understanding exactly what to incentivize and not. So we brought in like psychologists and like economic behaviorists that really helped us like tweak these algorithms. So now a lot of our customers rely on our suggestions because they just prefer it that way. But we never go directly. So we send them the suggestions and they can go into the app and say like, yes, no, or like adjust it and add their own stuff. We have a lot of templates and structured data of like what they should be doing, but theoretically they could do whatever, but they will see the feedback loop is fast, right? They send it out and their work is like, Nope, there it is. Which hardly ever happens with our suggestions because they had tweaked for where they’re at in the process and who they are makes sense.

Jacob: And outside of I mean the obvious one that we’ve referenced multiple times throughout and that would come up and that if I if I didn’t have the guidance and just the infrastructure you’re offering would just be like, okay, we’ll do this, but faster do this, but faster outside of just do something faster or get it done sooner. What that psychology perspective, what are kind of the other standout incentives to that actually have proven out and shown that people respond to and get things done better, faster, safer?

Sarah: Yeah, we do a lot on the safety side. It’s really important for us given like just my personal history with like seeing what can happen out there. Safety is utmost important for us. So a good safety bonus, for example, is somebody fixed like a scaffolding that had a gap in it. And so that’s something where people die, right? There’s like one pipe missing and somebody falls. And so somebody fixed it. And the safety manager who is like on site gave this person a bonus, right? It was like 50 bucks or something. And we automatically notified everybody else that this was happening. So because of the notifications, everybody started thinking like, Hey, how can I fix a hazard on site to keep my team buddy safe, but also to make extra money So it turns the construction site and their daily job into this gamified version of Pokemon Go. Like, how can you collect something on site by actually doing the right thing? So we shift consumer like users behavior towards the right thing where we want to do by simple psychology.

Jacob: Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Well, Sarah, this has been a fascinating conversation. For those listening who may want to follow you, learn more about Trunk Tools, keep up with all you and the company have going on. Where would be the best place for them to go to do so?

Sarah: So TrunkTools.com our website. You can find everything. You can sign up for a demo and me probably LinkedIn.

Jacob: Okay, wonderful. We will link to those in more in the show notes below. Sarah, thank you so much for your time and knowledge today. Hope to speak to you again sometime soon.

Sarah: Thank you very much.

Jacob: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over to SoarPay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s s.o.a.r.p.a.y Dot com slash podcast.