How Construction Firms can Use Data

🔎 What’s Driving the Construction Industry’s 57% Failure Rate in Estimating and Budgeting? Imagine this: A contractor wins a bid, starts the project, and soon finds costs spiraling out of control. 🚨 It's not because the materials are wrong, or the crew isn’t skilled—it’s because critical costs like supervision, cleanup, or project management were overlooked. Sound familiar? 🤔 What’s being missed? Poor cost estimating and insufficient budgeting plague over half of the construction industry. 📉 The consequences? Jobs overrun their budgets, profits evaporate 💸, and reputations suffer. Let’s take a closer look at what’s being ignored: 🛠️ Supervision Costs: Many bids fail to account for the time working foremen spend on paperwork and managing site conditions—tasks that aren’t included in their “working” hours. 👥 Crew Size Adjustments: Larger-than-expected crews and unplanned overtime stretch budgets to the breaking point. 📊 Historical Blind Spots: Without historical data to guide the bid, contractors rely on guesswork instead of formulas rooted in experience. ⚠️ Why does this keep happening? The problem often lies in the bidding process itself. Contractors don’t just miss the details—they underestimate the impact those details have. A foreman spending half their time supervising instead of working with their tool's changes everything. Failing to plan for cleanup, equipment uses, or project management creates a ripple effect 🌊 that turns small oversights into massive budget overages. 💡 What’s the solution? It starts with data—and a system to apply it. 📈 We’ve created a formula based on real-world historical data that allows you to estimate supervision costs, crew hours, and project-specific variables. Picture this: 🕒 Enter your supervisor’s hourly labor rate. 🛠️ Estimate the weekly hours needed for supervision and management. ✨ Watch as our super spreadsheet calculates the costs and integrates them into your bid. This isn’t guesswork; it’s precision planning. The spreadsheet even helps you visualize the entire project, accounting for labor, equipment, cleanup, per diem, and project management—all at bid time. ❓ So, let me ask you this: What would it mean for your business if you could eliminate these costly mistakes before the bid even goes out? ✅ Wouldn’t reducing errors and increasing profitability be worth the effort of rethinking your process? Let’s start the conversation! 💬 Share your thoughts—what’s holding your estimates back? 👇

Most construction companies describe themselves as "fast followers" when it comes to innovation. And historically that's made sense. Construction operates on tight margins. When you're making 3% profit, you can't invest 5% in R&D that might not work out. The math doesn't work. Silicon Valley might be able to afford to fail fast. But construction companies can't. BUT: the rules of fast following are changing dramatically. In the past, the consequences of being a fast follower were minimal. You could let other folks bear the cost and waste of experimentation, and invest in proven solutions because the distance between leaders and followers was manageable. But the current landscape is different. It’s a flywheel, driven by one’s data foundation. The more data you have, the more you can learn, which is itself more data, which helps you learn, and so on. By the time you see robotics working on someone else's job site and decide "now it's ready," you'll be facing a massive catch-up challenge. Those robots work only because they have a massive data foundation in place. I’m not suggesting construction companies throw caution to the wind and start experimenting with all kinds of new tech. What I am suggesting is building the data layer now, even if it’s imperfect. As I mentioned in a previous post, the tools are now here to make meaning out of unstructured data. So the cost of getting it “wrong” is a lot lower. The only wrong answer is to have no data at all. Once you have that data, start implementing some digital workflows. Not exactly bleeding edge stuff, but likely to make a meaningful difference in your company. If you want to get fancy, task someone to mess around with that data using some 3rd party LLMs (or take a look at a platform like Precogs 😉). Perhaps most importantly, start getting your team comfortable with change and agility. The muscle of being able to move more quickly is going to become more important than ever. It’s time to start building that muscle now. Because by the time you can see the future clearly, it might be too late to catch up.

Most outbound fails because it's lazy. But I'm seeing Vertical AI companies doing numbers with outbound. Let me explain: The game has changed for outbound sales. We can all feel it. Inboxes are overflowing, deliverability is down, cold calls go straight to voicemail, your prospects are drowning in generic pitches. And the cold outbound boys are sending hundreds of thousands of emails every month. With AI, this will only get worse. But in Vertical AI (or is it still cool to call it "saas") there are signals everywhere. You just have to know where to look. Here are two examples I'm seeing in the construction industry: Example 1: Using permit data to get the attention of your prospect The most common objection when you are selling to commercial contractors: "We just started a new project, I'll reach out when the next one starts." This is a false objection. What they are really saying is: "This isn't valuable enough for me to prioritize right now". Instead of waiting for the next project, get ahead of it. Use a tool like Shovels or go to the City's permit website to pull building permit data, then reach out with the context: "I saw that you just pulled a permit for the office complex on Main St. Based on the timeline, here are 3 risks that might impact your schedule..." Even better, create a monthly trend report for your city. Sort permits by contractor. Show who's winning the most work. Make a small database. Make it searchable (much easier to use than the city's permit website). Now you are delivering market intelligence. This is VALUE that the customer will appreciate. Example 2: Use residential home listings to find new sales opportunities If you sell to roofers, deck builders, or kitchen remodelers, use Clay to scrape Zillow/Realtor/etc. listings. Search for listings with phrases like: “needs new roof,” “dated kitchen,” “deck repairs.” Then personalize your outreach: “Saw the Oak St. listing mentioned a roof issue. Here’s what 3 nearby homes spent on similar jobs…” The signals are everywhere: Building permits Real estate listings Hiring data Tech implementations Funding announcements These are ways to provide value without permission from your prospect. All you need is a little bit of curiosity, some creativity, and a few $$$ to pay for the credits. Most of your competition is still blasting the same tired template to every name on a list. You can be the one who actually does the work. The data exists. Be the one who finds it and makes it useful. What signals are hiding in your vertical?