Sub Specialty Contractor

Hello Specialty Trade Community!

I hope everyone who attended this year's conference in Phoenix got as much from it as I did!  But now that it is done, we are already moving on to planning for next year.  As Vice Chair of the Specialty Trade committee, I am looking for your session ideas specific to our needs within the Specialty Trade Community. 

What keeps you up at night that you would like to see addressed at a session at next years conference or in a webinar?  What one little thing have you changed in your work flows that has made a big difference for you and could make a big difference for others in our community if the idea is shared?   

All ideas are welcome!  The specialty trade committee values your input!  Thank you in advance for sharing your ideas.   

Hi Rebecca,

One idea I have for a session or webinar that is becoming more popular in the specialty trades space is business owned, specific system integration layers. This is product, company, and process agnostic so it's more of a concept, where implementation varies by use case.

The operational value unlock from this in my experience can be pretty substantial and the barrier to entry is dropping pretty dramatically.

I believe this is an approach that would benefit from a session to help educate and drop barriers to a growing practice with less visibility and history than big SaaS products.

I would be interested to hear other people's opinion on this and would be happy to explore it further if you think this is a good session or webinar idea.

Here are a couple of options:

1. We are seeing some great optimizations from AI in our workflow.  It would be interesting to see a panel discussion to talk about the ways different subs have used AI.  I have created a group in our company (200 people) called the AI Champions.  It is comprised of around 30 people from different roles who have an interest in using AI.  We meet together monthly to discuss how we have used it and we evangelize to co-workers about ways they can use it in their workflow.  We have seen some people rise above the rest in their adoption, who we now lean on to help other divisions embrace AI.  We are developing AI agents, trying different tools, etc.  There is a lot of interest, so I think a session like this would be popular.   
2. I like the idea of a KPI session (similar to the one Joe Harper did), particularly around understanding the leading indicators of project profitability, so we can make adjustments early to salvage a project.
3. This might sound odd, but networking.  Accounting/finance is my second career, my first being sales.  It is natural for me to 'work the room' and build connections with others in our industry but for many accounting/finance people it is difficult to know how to do it.  To start with, understanding the value of building connections (what's in it for me), then some practical ways to build your network.