TradeGuard & Hourly Announce New Partnership | Will Accomando, Director of Sales, Hourly.io

SPEAKER_00:American builders and erase a dream. One brick, one beam. Building the American city.

Woo!

SPEAKER_00:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of American Builders. Today I'm here with Will Akamando. Akamando? Akamando? What's the right?

SPEAKER_01:Akamando. Akamondo's son. Akamondo's fine. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00:Will I appreciate you coming on. Will is with a new partner of ours at TradeGuard Hourly. And we just uh kind of officialized this partnership within the past couple weeks. So wanted to get Will on here to one, kind of provide some information to the audience on, you know, what do they need to know about payroll? What are the things that they probably don't know that they should know? And then go into some of the specifics of the partnership and how hourly's payroll solutions and our compliance solutions combined are creating some super valuable propositions for both of our customers. So we'll we'll start with just a little bit of background on you. How did you find your way into this payroll world?

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so um, you know, basically I started most of my career running businesses. I ran restaurants for over, you know, 20 years, multiple locations. You know, at the largest point, I had 27 locations. So I've used pretty much every payroll platform that's out there. Um, you know, went back to school, got a master's in finance, and said, you know, pretty good at this sales thing. I'm pretty good at finance. So moved into the sales world, um, found I can make an income and not have to work 100 hours a week. But um, I actually enjoy it. You know, payroll's uh the largest expense for most companies, you know. So it's very important that you get people paid on time, you know, in the correct manner, especially when it comes to contractors with uh different areas we're gonna discuss today. But um been in payroll now for about eight, a little over eight years.

Um been with two different companies,

SPEAKER_01:currently with Hourly, and um rest is history. You know, it's uh it's it's going very, very well. And I've helped uh a lot of companies streamline their operations and uh scale properly.

SPEAKER_00:One of the unique things about Hourly and kind of what made this partnership make so much sense is the fact that Hourly was founded by somebody who comes from the construction and the trades world. Talk to that a little bit and kind of how that has informed the way you guys approach selling to the construction and trades companies of the world.

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So um, Tom, our founder, actually had a very large general contracting company in Palo Alto, California. Lots of subs, lots of hourly employees as well. Um, and he hated how payroll and workers comp work together. So he is a software engineer. So ended up building this platform from the ground up. So our whole system is organic. We didn't buy and piece it out and then you know integrate different pieces. It's one complete product. So everything talks to each other very, very well, um, you know, including the time in attendance and uh, you know, document centers, the workers' comp integration, the certified payroll piece, prevailing wage piece. Um, but really he built it from the ground up and we started initially focusing just on contractors, um, still primarily our business, mostly contractors and other blue-collar professions.

But we've dove now into you know restaurants

SPEAKER_01:and offices and all different walks of life.

SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think the piece you mentioned there, the initial sort of impetus for why the company was was started is exactly the pain point that we're solving together, which is as a general contractor, it comes time for that premium audit, especially when it comes to workers' compensation. And now you're tasked with going and finding all of your subcontractors' COIs, their credentials, their licenses for the carrier. But in addition to that, you have to then provide all the W-2s, the 1099s, make sure everybody was classified correctly. Um, and again, that the that was the founding story and the so the problem you guys set out to solve was the payroll side of it. And on the trade guard side, we set out to solve the certificates of insurance, the proof of insurance on the subcontractor side. That's why this partnership makes so so much sense.

And we're gonna get into the insurance and payroll combined,

SPEAKER_00:how that helps with premium audits in a little bit. But let's start with just kind of some general information for the audience, the contractors of the world, give them some insight into the, you know, what are they missing in terms of quiet fees that might sneak up on payroll? What are the things that they're paying for that they might not necessarily know they're paying for?

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so there's a lot of different things that are in there. I mean, one, a lot of payroll companies are going to bill you separately for taxes. Um, you know, they don't do the certified payroll piece. And now that's coming in more and more nowadays with our contractors because they are picking up more government work and they have to have that certified payroll piece and they don't want to do it manually. I mean, I have companies that are spending eight to 10 hours a week because it's a weekly report, um, just putting one together. And if you miss one piece, it's those hidden costs come into play because you didn't pay it correctly. Now you're not getting paid for that contract, or you're out of compliance. Now you're getting fined. One of your subs doesn't file it correctly. Now you're liable for it. You know, there's a lot of different pieces that come into play there. But, you know,

SPEAKER_01:other pieces of just payroll alone, like time and attendance. You know, with our system, it's built in, it's automatic, it's already included, it's not an additional cost. You know, we lock rates for years so that you know what you're paying out there. A lot of companies, you know, they're going to give you a discount, give you a free month, and then, you know, at the end of the year it doubles. You know, we don't charge for W-2s, 1099s. A lot of those costs come into play, and a lot of people don't realize it until they get to the end of their year, and now all of a sudden they have all these bulk costs. And then indirectly with the you know, insurance piece of it, you know, the workers' comp premium. You know, you underestimate your payroll, you base a premium based on that payroll.

You know, if you go over, now you owe a bulk payment, you know, with a pay-go setup where we can integrate

SPEAKER_01:those policies into our system. You're only going to pay what you owe. You know, you're only going to pay what you actually need to know. And I know we'll dive into that farther a little bit later on on you know, separate class codes and things like that.

SPEAKER_00:Yeah, just to kind of you know summarize that up, you've got the the things that, you know, if you're talking to a payroll company, they'll they might say, here's the fee, right? And that's the fee for one sliver of the piece that you actually need. And then as years, as the time goes on, and you want to say, okay, well, now we need to do taxes. Well, now they're gonna add on another fee. Now we need to do this. And they start stacking stuff on. So for those listening, when you're going and evaluating the payroll options, Will, it sounds like you know, those are the questions you want to ask ahead of time is what am I actually getting for this fee? And what uh what are you not telling me? I guess is the question. And with hourly, it all kind of comes bundled in one.

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you want to be fully informed, you know, before you go look at them. You know, everybody's gonna look and shop options that are out there, and you got to find the ones that are honest with you. You know, they might be hiding something, you know, in their back pocket or they slide it around. It's like buying a house. You know, they just move numbers around, and the next thing you know, you have closing costs that are 10 times as high as you expected.

SPEAKER_00:Let's talk specifically about the certified payroll. This is something you know I wasn't too familiar with coming in and you know, at the start of this partnership, but for somebody who is getting into this government work, you know, just help them understand what is certified payroll, why is it important, and why does it matter?

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so certified payrolls when you're diving into government work, municipality work, anything for the state, um, you know, a lot of information has to be included, you know, especially when it comes to time in attendance. You know, you got to know when they clocked in, where they clocked in, what their job role was, what the name was, what the work classification was, what their daily and weekly hours are, uh, you know, what their gross wages, their deductions, their fringe benefits, if fringe benefits come into play, you know, all those things have to be included. You miss one of those numbers, you're getting rejected. You're not gonna get paid for that job. And that's really, really important. You know, and a good system like ours tracks all that information automatically.

SPEAKER_00:And I think the biggest piece, like you said, is putting together these weekly reports. One, there's there's a time aspect to it, right? It takes a lot of time to put together all this information if you're doing it manually. But then two, there's the risk component of well, what if you do it wrong? Well, now you just spent all this time, you did it wrong, and now your paycheck is getting delayed. Talk to that a little bit. And what, you know, what have you seen is typical for somebody who's doing it uh sort of manually? What how much time are they spending on this right now?

SPEAKER_01:I I mean a classic example. I got a company in Ohio that's you know, they have only six employees, but it was taking them eight hours a week to do it. And a lot of companies, what happens to certified payroll? They wait. They don't do it weekly, and now they got to backdo it because they didn't want to take the time, and now it's even longer. You know, um, so I see them falling out of compliance, not getting those things done on time, or they're just frustrated and you just do it incorrectly. You know, and and with a system like ours, it'll automatically do it for you. If you're using the tools in our system, it builds it for you. You upload it, it takes five minutes, it's $12 per report or even less if you bundle. Um, so it really streamlines that process for you.

SPEAKER_00:And then, you know, there's the piece that you mentioned of of actually getting paid on time, right? Talk to that a little bit. And you know, what does that actually look like? You know, you file this report, if you do it wrong, you're not getting paid. If you don't do it in time, you're not getting paid. Like what are the implications of that?

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I can't say the time frame because every you know agency is gonna be different on how they work and what their you know contracts are with that company. But you know, yeah, any delay in payment is not good. You know, you got to pay your employees. If you're not getting the money in time, how are you gonna pay your employees? Now you have frustrated employees, you're gonna lose employees in that case. And some of these guys, you know, you don't want to lose. There's already high turnover in the GC world. You know, you want to minimize that. So if you're paying your guys on time, you're paying your subs on time, the bills are getting paid, you're not balancing things, you have a happier crew, you have a more productive crew, and you're saving your time yourself time overall.

SPEAKER_00:And, you know, for the people listening, there's there's kind of two buckets that you might fall in. There's the GC who's been doing it for a while, or the contractor who's been doing it for a while, and they're just tired of doing it manually, they're tired of making the mistakes. Okay, well, understand that there's solutions out there that make that process easier. And for the folks who are just now getting into some of this government work, you know, understand that if you do it the right way from the get-go, your life will be significantly easier. Okay, let's talk a little bit now about the prevailing wages. It's a similar kind of concept, right? It it touches on the same sort of government work aspect. But again, what is it? How does it work and why is this important?

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so uh when you're talking about prevailing wages, there's a wage that has to be paid based on that project, based on whatever agencies you know denoting the project at the time. So, say it's like a carpenter, the prevailing wage is $55 an hour. So you have to pay them $55 an hour, but there's fringe benefits involved. So the base wage is $40 an hour. That fringe benefit is $15 an hour, that equals the $55 an hour. So what it does is it prevents contractors from undercutting the labor markets in that area. Um, so they already set a specific wage for that specific job. And if you're not paying that, you can be fined. You know, and and it it keeps everything fair, basically, in those areas. Um, it's ensuring that your workers have fair compensation, you know, when they're getting paid.

SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And then I and I I know this is something that you've touched on in just previous conversations of ours. If you have two different types, you know, one person doing two types of classified work. I just explain kind of what that nuance is and how you guys handle that.

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so wrong classification is a piece of that prevailing wage. If you're not classifying the worker correctly, you know, you might be paying too much, you may be paying too little. So in our system, what it tracks is not only the job role. So say you have a contractor and one does um concrete work part of the day, and then later in the day they're doing carpentry. It's two different job roles, two different pay rates, two different class codes. Our system at our insurance comes into play. You know, we're tracking all of that information and they can actually switch automatically from their handheld device between those roles, or you can record it manually, but it's gonna track all of that information on each line item.

So now you have them classified correctly, you're paying them the correct wage, and um it's recording for your premium for insurance the right rate for the right class code.

SPEAKER_01:Um, where that in the long run is gonna save you money and it's gonna save you time, you know, because our system, again, will do it automatically for you. You don't have to go in and manually redo everything. And that again, certified payroll, prevailing wages, they're very specific. And our system will automatically track all of that for you. So it's one button to push, it spits out the report, you upload it into our partner site, and it gives you that certified payroll report in less than five minutes.

SPEAKER_00:And you know, I want to just touch on some of the actual penalties. You know, I did some research ahead of this and like I tried to understand, okay, well, what is what actually happens if you do this wrong? There's part of it is, you know, first you might have to pay back some of these wages. So if you underpay somebody, you might have to pay them back to sort of resolve that conflict. There's even civil money penalties, I think up to $13,500 per violation as of 2025. That's assessed per worker per pay period. So obviously that stacks across multiple crews. Um, and then the government can even withhold their payment, like we've talked about. So if you haven't done this properly, and the government is the one who's supposed to pay you out, so you can pay your employees, pay your subs, if you're not doing that properly, that can get um sort of you know withheld. And then there is a uh one

SPEAKER_00:piece here about debarment when you're barred from bidding on any federally funded work. So if you continually do this wrong over and over again, you can then just be fully prevented from bidding on any of these jobs. It looks like up to three years, uh, two violations in a five-year window can even can trigger that. So if you do that twice wrong in a five-year period, you might be banned from doing that work altogether. And if you're somebody who relies heavily on this, that could be catastrophic to the business.

SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, not only that, it's businesses that want to get into that. I mean, that's where money is. The government jobs give you a lot of revenue. So if you want to dive into that, we can help you get into that, you know, and do it correctly from the get-go. You know, um, like you said, you can get banned from that work or you can gain that work. If you do it correctly, you're gonna get more contracts. So now you're increasing your revenue even further. Now you're able to bring on more people, bigger jobs, more bigger paychecks, you know, and that's where most companies want to go. The sky's the limit at that point. So that's what our help, our system helps develop or maintain when you when you're using our system and also a system like yours.

SPEAKER_00:And before we kind of move on to the next topic, I want to just touch on a piece that I learned, which is this doesn't just apply to, let's say, you know, an individual contractor working on a job. If you're a GC, you are also liable for your subcontractors to be doing this properly. Right. So again, this touches on this whole world uh from as a general contractor, whether it's insurance, whether it's the government enforcing it, you have a lot of liability that exists when you're relying on the subcontractors to do the work properly, which just kind of you know it proves the value of the tools like hourly and like Trade Guard. Let's talk some of the costly mistakes that come with payroll. You know, I think the first one is taxes, obviously outside of the insurance. But you know, let's touch on a few of these. We'll start with taxes. How do you guys go about taxes?

What are some of the mistakes

SPEAKER_00:that you've seen that cost people lots of things.

SPEAKER_01:And you know, to get over it real briefly, you know, if you file your taxes late, you're gonna get fined. You know, then you got to do amendments, and then fees and fines come into play with those amendments. Um, we avoid that because we have a very accurate tax engine. Other things, you're not paying certain taxes. I've had a lot of payroll companies get transferred over into us and they're not paying Indiana's a big one. They there's a bunch of local municipality taxes. If you don't have, if you're not paying those, now your employees aren't paying their taxes, which obviously it's tax fraud. So our system has caught a lot of those errors, implemented the right policies, put the right codes in the right place, and now they're paying the taxes correctly. Um, so it's not just that we set them up correctly. We might catch errors when you come from another payroll company, which saves you,

SPEAKER_01:again, time, money, and fines.

SPEAKER_00:I think that's that was a perfect way to sum it up. There's there's like the three buckets that if you're doing this wrong, that can cost you. There's the time of one, you're doing it manually yourself, that's costing you time. If you make a mistake, now you have to redo it, that's costing you time, which obviously the time costs you money. And then there's the big one, which is the fines. And so doing this right from the get-go avoids those three. So if you're kind of thinking about, you know, what am I actually going to be preventing by signing up for a platform like hourly or a platform like TradeGuards? It's the time, it's the money, and it's the fees. Absolutely. The time theft piece of things. You guys have a super unique feature in terms of the GPS tracking. Talk to that a little bit.

I think this is probably, you know, fairly common, especially in the trades and the contractors of

SPEAKER_00:the world. You've got buddy punching, padded timesheets. Just touch on that a little bit. And you know, what have you seen and how do you guys prevent that?

SPEAKER_01:Definitely. This is our biggest differentiator with other payroll companies. As far as I know, at this point, we're the only payroll company that has full GPS tracking. So not only can we show where your employee cocked in, which we can also geofence so they can only clock in when they get to that location and clock out before they leave or to alert you if they don't clock out. But we have full GPS tracking. So once they clock in, it's going to drop a pin every 100 to 150 feet throughout the day everywhere they go with their phone. A lot of GCs use truck tracking. That's great. But they can park the truck and they can go somewhere else. No one leaves their phone behind. So that's going to track exactly where they went. Now it's not in real time yet, something we are working towards. However, it gives a shift review per individual, per day, per shift. And it you can actually pull up a map

SPEAKER_01:and it will show you exactly where they went. When that comes into play with insurance, guy's supposed to be at this job, says he got hurt here, but the whole thing showed he wasn't there all day long. Now you have something to bring to a claims adjuster. You have actual documentation. Can never say it's going to work, but it's more than you would have had if you're using a different system.

SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's there's the aspect of just, you know, as a GC running a business, you want to make sure you can, you know, your guys are where they say they are. But like you said, there's a liability aspect to it as well. If something goes wrong, you have the evidence to support that. You know, you see it all the time, especially on the workers' comp side. People having false claims. I saw a video the other day of some guy, there's a security camera in the office. The guy's standing there, looks around, and he just like does a fake slip and fall trying to get a workers' comp claim. Luckily, that person had a camera in the office, and you know, luckily, if you're using hourly, you have that GPS tracking to back.

SPEAKER_01:Additional safeguards.

SPEAKER_00:Additional safeguards. Exactly. Now, 1099s versus W-2. This is something that I think a lot of people in construction kind of they, you know, they do wrong, if you will. And there's there's some benefits to it, right? Obviously, you have some tax implications if you're paying 1099 versus W 2. But you know, what what have you seen? How how does this play out usually when you're talking to people? And you know, just talk to a little bit about the the errors or the you know, what could go wrong if you're misclassifying these 1099 versus W 2?

SPEAKER_01:So that's a big one. Um, a lot of there's a lot of people that class that they want to classify everybody as a 1099 because they don't want to pay you know the taxes um, you know, on that as an employer. So the problem is majority of time they're actually W-2 employees. You know, if you're telling them where to go, you're dictating their hours, you're dictating the job, you're they're using your tools, they're a W-2 employee. You know, if you're just telling them, hey, go to this job, and when you're done, you're done, that's more of a 1099 employee. But again, if they're using your equipment, that can fall into W-2. So it's a very, very fine line. You know, and I see a lot of startups that have everybody 1099, and then they come in, they're like, well, you know, I tell them when they get there, I tell them what to do. And I'm like, bro, that's a W-2 employee.

You got to have them classified

SPEAKER_01:right because now you're looking at fines. Again, that's tax evasion. You know, in the grand scheme of things, it's tax evasion. Um, you know, your employees want to get paid correctly. You know, they could have tax issues if they're not classified correctly, you know, um, and they owe a big lump sum if they're 1099 at the end of the year. And if they haven't been saving, you know, they might owe the government and now they're getting fined, you know, and interest is being added in. So really designating them the correct way from day one, which we can help advise. We're not CPAs, that's really a CPA question. However, we can give some guidance in that aspect or refer you to one of our partners that can help out in that classification uh area.

SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, talk to that a little bit more. What do you, because like you said, if you're the business owner, you don't want to do this, right? It's it's one of those things where it's like, I don't want to pay these taxes. How do you help people understand, you know, when it makes sense to switch over, what the implications are? Like, what does that conversation look like?

SPEAKER_01:Again, with with us, I have a big broker network that I've built, and most of our you know, uh territory sales managers here do have broker networks or people that we trust and have built over the years that give the same level of service that we do, you know, know their field inside it out, or specialists. So that's really we can advise like, hey, this sounds like a W 2, but here's somebody you can talk to to really get you know advice. Or if they have a CPA, go to your CPA, explain the situation, ask them because they They're really the specialists. We stay out of that portion of it because we don't want to come out of compliance when we're telling somebody. Usually I can give enough guidance. I mean, it's most of the time it's blatantly obvious, you know.

But but again, you always refer them back to a specialized source that says, you know, this is the defining factor, this is how we're

SPEAKER_01:gonna tax. And usually that's a CPA that's gonna give them that advice.

SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think just to close this side out on the taxes, and it's like, okay, well, who's gonna come after me if I'm 1099 versus W2? What who who's knocking on my door? You could have IRS, you could have the state, you could have your workers' comp carrier. Like, there's a lot of ways. And especially when at the end of every year, you know, all three of those entities are gonna be are gonna be looking in. And so if you're doing this wrong for a long enough period of time, it's gonna come back to bite you. It's not if it's when. Exactly. Exactly. So let's talk about the insurance side. You know, I'm gonna I'll I'll do some some minute to explain here for a sec before we get into it, the the typical audit situation. So how this works um when it comes to workers' compensation, like you mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the year, typically you're going to tell the carrier, here's how

SPEAKER_00:much payroll we expect to have, and here's the classification of that payroll. Carrier's gonna look at that and say, Okay, you're paying this classification, meaning carpentry, this much per year. They then basically bucket that up and assign a price to that. If you go over or under at the end of the year, that comes out during the audit. They're gonna look and say, okay, send me all of your W-2s, your 1099s, we'll see how things are classified and check if you overestimated or underestimated. That's on the payroll side. On the compliance side, and this is where a lot of people get tripped up with the 1099 things that we were discussing. If you have somebody who is a 1099 uh that is working under you, a subcontractor, and they do not have uh insurance or you do not have proof that they have insurance, during that audit period audit period, the carrier is going to look at that and they're

SPEAKER_00:going to say, This person doesn't have insurance. That means they are going to treat it as basically one of your employees. So let's say you paid a subcontractor $50,000 throughout the year. You didn't project that at the start of the year. That subcontractor didn't have insurance, it comes out during the audit. Carrier is going to look at that, move that $50,000 to your payroll, which obviously is going to increase the premium. That's when you get hit with the fine. So just from a logistics perspective and just kind of setting a foundation, that is how the audit works. Well, I'm going to kick it over to you so you can talk about how hourly helps with this on the payroll side, um, and specifically what it looks like during throughout the year, the pay-go option, and then that kind of one-click premium audit.

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so definitely. So um, what we do differently than most payroll providers is that we again we track not only the job role, the pay rate, but also the class code. You know, so and it does it very, very accurately. During your policy period, it's tracking all of that data and it's compiling it, but it's we set most of our systems are gonna be set up as a paygo option. We have we're workers comp carrier agnostic here at Hourly. Um, so we don't have internal broker teams where we're limited on our scope. So we can set up a paygo option. Pay-go means you're paying per payroll period based on your actual payroll data. So at the end of the year, you're not gonna go over. If anything, you're gonna go under.

And where the underage comes in, if you have that employee that has two different class codes, so they're doing carpentry and concrete work, two different class codes, two different risks,

SPEAKER_01:it's gonna track all that data. Now, with insurance company policies, it's always gonna bill at the higher percentage for that policy period. Whatever rate is for that one employee is higher, it's gonna be billed at that. However, it's going to track all those lower percentages. So at the end of the year, hypothetically, you will get a refund for that difference. You know, our system is very, very accurate at tracking those codes. And that's why a lot of contractors do come to us because they do have, you know, guys that work three or four different jobs on the site. And again, it's all handheld mobile device. They're able to flip right between them as they switch them, or you can go in manually and just add and subtract them throughout the day or change the class codes for those different policy periods or different time periods.

SPEAKER_00:And the the beauty of the paygo option, like you mentioned, is there's you're not estimating and then giving a big chunk away and then waiting 12 months to figure out if you were over or under. You are paying the premium as you're paying the payroll. So, from a cash flow perspective, this is a great tool for contractors.

SPEAKER_01:And also, benefit of that, it typically waves the deposit. So if you're set up as a paygo, you waive the deposit, it uh automatically reports all of your payroll. So you don't have to manually report your payroll. And it's the one-click audit in our system. So it's one click, sends the audit report automatically uh to the carrier. Yes, there could be an audit, but as long as all that data is correct, it's going to be very minimal. Unless, again, you put in bad information, bad information out requires, you know, big audit. So it is what you put into it. But if you're using our time in attendance and you're using the tools, all that information should be correct. One click, very streamlined audit process with all of our carriers.

SPEAKER_00:And now this is where where TradeGuard comes in. So, you know, when you're looking at an audit, uh, the carrier's looking at the audit, the payroll is kind of the biggest thing they want to see. But the other piece uh that's kind of been missing is the compliance side, right? Everything I mentioned about okay, your payroll is classified, all that's good. But for those who are not your W-2 employees, we need to make sure they have their own workers' compensation insurance. Typically, how this was done is you would collect COIs from those subs. Uh, a lot of times there's a lot of back and forth between them, the broker, trying to get the limits right, adding on certain endorsements. That is what TradeGuard handles end to end. So now when you combine the two of these, hourly is handing the handling the payroll, the classification.

TradeGuard is handling the collection of all the COIs, the back

SPEAKER_00:and forth between the sub, the GC, and the broker, resolving any discrepancies. So at the end of the year, you have the whole package that's needed bundled up, which essentially what this does is it makes this, you know, it makes this premium almost bulletproof in that you have everything you need ready to go. And hopefully what this ultimately does is lower your risk profile in the eyes of the carrier. You know, if you're somebody who's using hourly and you're using TradeGuard and you're using them together, you are a much, much more reliable risk than a GC who's doing all this on paper and who's doing guesswork. They're not verifying certificates of insurance. And so I just want to lay that out. That is where the power of this comes together. We'll kind of close it out there. We covered a lot of topics. Anything else you want to add, Will?

I mean, I guess what uh, you know, what did you

SPEAKER_00:think when how how for context, how this came about? You know, I was talking with one of our carrier partners. The carrier said, you should talk to uh Will over at hourly. I think there could be a conversation there. Talk to Will. You know, we were like, okay, there's actually opportunity for for something deeper. And so spent the past two months kind of fleshing out the details of what this looks like and kind of inked the deal within the past couple weeks.

SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, it's great, man. I mean, I saw the promise in it when you spoke specifically to the risk and compliance for the contractors, and that's you know, a majority of our base of our clients are contractors. And I'm like, this could be something interesting, you know. And I brought it to the uppers and they said, I think this is interesting. And next thing you know, here we are. You know, we're on a podcast talking about the partnership. So it's uh it's super cool. I'm very excited about it. I think it's gonna be a great partnership.

SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Will where can people find you? Uh, whether it's LinkedIn, you know, email, just give the people uh that want to reach out to you where where can they reach out?

SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I mean, you can call me directly. I'm not shy. You got my cell phone number. It's uh 480-628-8890-247. I'm always available to my clients or prospects looking for different options or just have questions in general. Um, you can also uh email me at will.acamondo at hourly.io. I'm sure my name for spelling will probably be in the podcast title. So uh you can look there. Um, or um, yeah, that those are the easiest ways. And I can go over everything with them. We set up a call, I'll show them the system. We really look at what do you do, what do you want to do, and we see how we can get there. Beautiful. Will thank you so much. Yeah, thanks, man. It was a pleasure being on, buddy. Bye, everybody.