Speaker: Samantha Beaudoin, Systems and Operations Specialist, Yutka Fence
[0:00]
ArcSite is revolutionizing that for us. It is automating so much of that. It'll increase revenue. It'll increase just our overall brand image. It improves everything.
My name is Samantha Beaudoin. I work at Yutka Fence as a Systems and Operations Specialist. I have been with Yutka Fence for about three years.
So we were handling estimates before ArcSite very manually. We have manual drawings — which are nice, they are very nice — but it's very time consuming. Manual bill of materials being created. So it was, it was all a very manual process.
ArcSite is revolutionizing that for us. It is automating so much of that. It is giving us a digital drawing which is miles and away cleaner than the hand-drawn estimate drawings.
Yeah, the bill of material — we were entering it in a separate system. So now we don't have to do that. It generates that on its own.
So once you get the hang of it, you get to know it. It can be pretty routine and pretty systematic to be able to upload what you need and get everything set up and ready to go for the guys out on the field. Just the efficiency alone that it's going to bring — it'll increase revenue. It'll increase just our overall brand image. It improves everything.
[1:28]
I've done a little bit with playing around with proposals and making them look nicer in the system that we're in. So I kind of took that and said, well, what can I do with ArcSite? How can I take what they've put together — which was pretty great to begin with — and how can I brand it and make it our own?
So I looked to AI, honestly, and it helped. And we have some very lovely looking proposals now thanks to HTML — and ArcSite worked with that, it allowed us to use that.
So I think it's always been a goal of ours. We've always wanted to get to the point where it was automated. But, you know, between the drawing and the BoM — we kept it in our sights. And I'm really excited to see the changes that it brings our company.
(End — 2:01)
Let's start with the basics. Tell us a little about Yutka Fence.
Yutka Fence has been around since 1968 — started by Paul Yutka when he came back to Kenosha after serving in the Air Force. What began as a general contracting business eventually became entirely focused on fencing, and it's been family-owned ever since. Paul's son Brett joined his father in 2004, and in 2009, Brett and his wife officially took over ownership of the company.
We specialize in mid-to-large residential projects, mostly across southeast Wisconsin — Kenosha, Milwaukee, Racine, the surrounding counties. Wood, vinyl, aluminum, chain link — the full range. We have seven design technicians on the team. We've been on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies.
How was the estimating process handled before ArcSite?
Manually. Everything was manual. Our estimators would go out to a job site, do their measurements, and come back and draw up the estimate by hand. The drawings were actually pretty nice — our guys took pride in them — but it was time-consuming work. And that was just the drawing.
Then you had the bill of materials on top of that. We were entering all of that into a separate system, by hand, after the fact. So you had two separate manual steps just to get an estimate out the door.
We would perform the estimates on site and usually took about 1 - 1.5 hours.] Our Techs typically do 3-4 per day and sometimes up to 5 in our busy season. Year to date we are at about 1400 estimates.
What made you start looking for a different solution?
Automation had always been the goal, honestly. We knew where we wanted to get to. It was just a matter of finding something that actually handled both sides of it — the drawing and the bill of materials — without creating a whole new set of problems. We first heard about ArcSite at FenceTech, and began conversations from there.
What does the workflow look like now?
Once you get the hang of it, it becomes pretty routine. You go out to the site, do your measurements, build the drawing in ArcSite — and the bill of materials generates automatically from that. You're not re-entering anything. You're not cross-referencing two different systems. It's done.
The drawings are digital, which is a significant upgrade from what we were producing before. Cleaner, more professional, and they go straight into the proposal.
You also worked on the proposals themselves — can you talk about that?
That was something I took on personally. I've always been interested in how things are presented — the brand side of it. So when we got into ArcSite, I started thinking about what we could do with the proposal output. How do we take what the tool gives us and make it look like us?
I used AI to help with some of the design work, and between that and what ArcSite allows you to customize, we ended up with proposals that look significantly more polished. It's something we'd always wanted — a proposal that reflects the quality of the actual work we do. Now we have that.
What's the impact been on the business overall?
We're still early, but I'm genuinely excited about where this goes. The efficiency alone is significant. When you take that kind of manual work off the plate, your estimators can move faster, you can take on more jobs, and the whole customer experience improves — because what they're receiving is cleaner and more professional from the start.
That has revenue implications. It has brand implications. It improves a lot of things downstream, even if it doesn't look like much from the outside.
What would you say to another fence company that's still running estimates the old way?
That we were you. And the manual process isn't bad — it works, people make it work — but there's a ceiling on how efficient you can be when every estimate is built from scratch by hand. At some point the volume catches up with you.
The learning curve with ArcSite is real, but it's short. Once it clicks, it's systematic. And what comes out the other side — the drawings, the materials list, the proposals — is a different level than what you were producing before. That difference is visible to your customers. Overall, the feedback we have received from the techs out in the field has been extremely positive.
