A packed ballroom watching Shawn Van Dyke on the RessioCon main stage

RessioCon 2026 · October 6–8 · Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C.

Build better, together.

Three days, two stages of keynotes, five hands-on breakouts, and a lot of builders helping builders. Here's what happened at our first RessioCon.

Watch the highlight reel

Builders teaching builders

RessioCon is Ressio's annual customer learning and community conference. In 2026 we brought builders, remodelers, partners, ambassadors, and the Ressio team together in Washington, D.C. to learn practical workflows, connect with each other, and shape what we build next.

The best part was builders getting up to show other builders how they run their business, then sticking around afterward to answer more questions.

“I came to RessioCon thinking about product. I left thinking about people.”

Mitchell Kasselman, CEO, Ressio

150+

builders in the room

days in D.C.

keynotes

panels with live Q&A

210+

seats filled across 5 breakout workshops

features in the live bracket

1,286

votes cast in the core bracket

95%

positive attendee feedback

The night before

Tuesday, October 6

Builders filling the Omni Shoreham lobby bar at the welcome happy hour

The RessioCon 2026 sign at the welcome reception

Happy hour

Welcome happy hour: mix and mingle

6:00–8:00 PM · The Omni Shoreham

The night before kickoff, builders picked up their badges and RessioCon shirts and got to know each other over drinks. Longtime customers met builders who had just signed on, and plenty of attendees met the Ressio team in person for the first time.

One of the best moments: Joe and Lisa Dannenberg of Halm & Perkins, one of Ressio's earliest customers, talking shop with brand-new builders. Asked whether they ever thought we'd get here, their answer was yes. They'd believed it since year one.

What we heard

“Builders were way more willing to get involved, have fun, and be open about their business than I expected.”

Ben Reed, Ressio marketing

Day 1

Wednesday, October 7

Attendees arriving past the RessioCon 2026 "Build Smarter, Build Together" sign

Kickoff

Kickoff with Mitch

Ressio CEO Mitchell Kasselman opened the show with the theme for the week, "Build better, together," and a simple framing: software only matters if builders, crews, and clients actually use it, and the best answers to that problem come from builders themselves.

Keynote

How to scale your construction business

Todd Dawalt, Construction Leading Edge

Todd opened the main stage with a practical playbook for scaling without sacrificing profit, control, or freedom, and set a high bar for the two days. It was the most-mentioned session in our attendee survey, and builders lined up to talk with him afterward.

What he covered

Growing revenue without losing margin
Building systems so every decision doesn't run through the owner
Keeping control as the team gets bigger

Dave Kersting on the main stage in front of a slide reading We poured the foundation

Keynote

You bought the software. Now fix the business.

Dave Kersting, Capovario

Dave challenged the room to stop expecting software to solve business problems on its own. The tool is only as good as the processes, people, and data behind it, so fix the business, then let the software amplify it.

Power user panelists on stage taking questions

An attendee asking the panel a question from the floor

Panel · Live Q&A

Power user workflows

Ressio power users, including Dan DeVol (DeVol Builders) and Oliver Debe (Realistic Builders), walked through exactly how they run their businesses in the platform, then took questions from the floor. Many attendees named the panels as their favorite part of the show.

A standout: Dan DeVol of DeVol Builders explained that he doesn't accept text messages from clients. Every message runs through Ressio, backed by a one-page "how we'll work together" document every client receives. The payoff is clear expectations, clients who self-select, and nobody texting him at 11:30 on a Saturday night. The room kept the follow-up questions coming during the panel, and dozens more found him afterward.

How Dan runs client communication

Clients don't text Dan. Every message runs through Ressio.
Every client gets a one-page “how we'll work together” doc up front.
Clients know what to expect, and the ones who don't like it self-select out.

Breakout workshops

Five breakout workshops

Attendees picked two of five 45-minute sessions, and each one ran twice. Breakouts came up about a dozen times in the post-event survey, and most of those people wanted more of them.

Shawn Van Dyke walking through the five foundations of Profit First

Workshop 01

Profit First for contractors

Shawn Van Dyke

28 builders across two rounds

An interactive cash-flow workshop built around Shawn's five-bank-account system, with a book giveaway and signing. Shawn is offering free weekly business coaching for RessioCon attendees through the end of the year, Fridays at 2 PM Eastern.

Profit is not an event. Profit is a habit.
Set up the five accounts and know what each one is for
Open a "Profit" account at your bank and start small

Email for the coaching link

Melissa Leediker, Turquant Builder Services

Workshop 02

QBO diagnostics: why your Ressio numbers and your QuickBooks don't match

Melissa Leediker, Turquant Builder Services

31 builders across two rounds

“We walked builders through how to identify and fix the most common QuickBooks Online setup issues that silently distort job costing and financial reporting. Attendees left with a clear picture of where their books stand and a prioritized list of next steps to get their financials working the way their business actually runs.”

Cost codes not mapping, change orders not syncing, overhead bleeding into job costs
A live diagnostic on each attendee's own books, not a demo account
A completed diagnostic and a prioritized cleanup plan for every attendee

Session resources

Workshop 03

Pre-construction: getting paid for it

Nathan Rosenlund, Kodiak Consulting

55 builders across two rounds

A fill-in-the-blank workshop on treating pre-construction as a defined, sellable service. The big idea: charge a little to gain a lot.

Where sales and estimating end and pre-construction begins, and when to charge
What you're actually selling, and how to package, price, and explain it
How the process differs for custom builders, remodelers, design-build, specialty, and commercial contractors

Book 30 minutes with Nathan

Workshop 04

Building culture that actually works

Levi Maxwell, Paramount Remodeling Co., with Alex Gregg (Gregg Homebuilding) and Dan DeVol (DeVol Builders)

40+ builders across two rounds

An honest owner-to-owner roundtable, no slides. The headline finding: almost nobody in the room was the top payer in their market, and that's OK. Career growth and how a supervisor treats people both rank above pay, and a small shop controls both.

Culture fit vs. skill, and the high performer who's toxic to the team
Retention when you can't outbid the next guy
Levi's next move: writing down the career path for every role, so his crew can see where they're headed

Follow @builtbyparamount

Matt Humble and Chris Savage, Builder Clarity

Workshop 05

Overcoming obstacles to growth

Matt Humble and Chris Savage, Builder Clarity

59 builders across two rounds, the most-attended breakout

A session on "owner lock," when the owner is the only expert and decision-maker and becomes the company's growth bottleneck.

Find where owner dependence is capping growth
Systemize repeatable processes like estimating and scheduling
Create enough operational clarity to delegate

A Ressio team member walking two builders through a workflow on a laptop

Office hours

CS office hours

Between and after sessions, Ressio's customer success team held open office hours: dedicated tables where builders could sit down with a CSM, get unstuck on a real workflow, and walk out with it fixed. Day 2 office hours were Mason AI themed.

What we heard

“Even long-standing customers have more value to unlock in Ressio.”

Ressio customer success team

Builders gathered in the sunlit bar at Open City

Builders talking around a table at Open City

Happy hour

Evening happy hour at Open City

Sponsored by Todd Dawalt and Construction Leading Edge · 5:00–7:00 PM

Day 1 wrapped with a builder happy hour at Open City. More of the same: builders comparing notes, swapping numbers, and making plans to visit each other's job sites.

Day 2

Thursday, October 8

Shawn Van Dyke walking through his five core systems slide

Shawn Van Dyke presenting four core principles

Keynote

Stop fixing the wrong problems

Shawn Van Dyke

Shawn opened Day 2 by helping builders find the real bottleneck in their business instead of treating symptoms. His talk walked through the core systems every construction business runs on, from project management and time tracking to payroll and the books.

What he covered

Finding the real bottleneck instead of chasing symptoms job to job
A repeatable workflow for making the big decisions faster
Putting your time where it actually moves margin

Keynote

The builder's dashboard

Morgan Molitor, Construction2Style · Trapper Roderick

Morgan and Trapper focused on the numbers that actually matter and how to build a dashboard you'll look at every week. Their talk was built around four core principles for what an owner should actually be looking at.

What they covered

The handful of numbers that tell you how a job is really going
Getting scattered project data into one view an owner will actually check
Cutting the noise so the team acts on what matters

Panel · featuring Mason

AI in action

Builders who use AI every day shared what's working. The big picture: clear goal first, clean data in, verify the output.

What we heard

“I don't doubt that Mason is the future, but we're all boomers, and it's going to take us time to adopt.”

Builder at RessioCon 2026

AI in action panelists on stage with the moderator at the podium

A Ressio team member in a Mason AI shirt reading How can I help you today

Top use cases builders shared

1Weekly client job summaries from a saved Mason workflow button.
2Voice-to-text daily logs, with Mason compiling weekly summaries and lessons learned.
3Searching across jobs: "have we used this tile or detail before?"
4Punch lists: ramble into your phone, Mason organizes by room and pushes to a to-do list.
5Paper form plus a photo, and Mason transcribes it into a daily log.
6An owner's 7 a.m. brief covering AR, AP, and red flags.

Adoption lessons

Name a champion who trains the team and shows wins at meetings.
Sit with field users for their first attempt.
Explain the why, not just the what.
Make it part of the job, and reward it.
Crawl, walk, run.

Builder spotlight: Desi Gehl, Waldmann Construction

Desi wanted daily logs from the field without adding app friction. Her crew fills out a paper template, snaps a photo, and Mason posts the log in Ressio. She trained the team in a weekly meeting, wrote it into the job description, and tied it to a stipend. Her team went from barely using Mason to one of the most active of any Ressio customer.

Game

The live feature bracket

The most fun hour of the show. We put 16 core product features (plus an 8-feature innovation bracket) head to head, March Madness style, and let the room vote live. Factions formed, people lobbied for their picks, and party poppers were involved.

The results went straight to our product team.

What we heard

“Seeing customers vote live, head to head, showed what they actually prioritize when forced to choose, and it didn't always match what we'd have ranked.”

Ressio engineering team

Builders voting on their laptops during the live feature bracket

Core bracket final results

1Advanced permissions214 votes
2Undo/redo on estimate202 votes
3Reporting dashboards161 votes
4Offline file uploads152 votes

See places 5–8

5A/P email inbox104
6Save budget/estimate views97
7Tagging for daily logs & vendors91
8Advanced notifications70

A builder and a Ressio leader in conversation between sessions

Roundtables

Product feedback roundtables

Small groups of builders sat down with people from Ressio's product, engineering, CS, and sales teams to talk through the bracket results and what they need next. Every table's notes went to the product team.

What came up most

Vendor bills. One AP team reconciles close to $100K in vendor charges every Friday.
Two-way voice with Mason, so you can talk to it from the truck
Permissions, offline uploads in the field, and better ways to organize files

What we heard

“Getting to dive deeper into what's working, what's not, and build a relationship outside of Zoom.”

Ressio customer success team

Closing

Mason 2.0, the Ressio roadmap, and closing remarks

We closed the show with a look at Mason 2.0 and what's next on the Ressio roadmap, then a thank-you from Mitch to every builder who got on stage or stayed late to answer one more question.