Twenty-five years in construction, now sitting on your side of the table.
We start by watching how your office actually runs for a week, then fix the one thing that pays back first. You won’t get a canned deck or a platform you have to learn before it helps you.
- years in construction
- 25
- years as regional director
- 10
- a year at that contractor
- $500M
- in active work carried at once
- $60M+
The operator
Who you're actually hiring.
Cleanup laborer for his father, then carpentry and framing, then project engineer, then commercial PM, then regional director. Twenty-five years, none of it at a software company.
Ten years at Harper General Contractors in Greenville, South Carolina, an ENR Top 400 firm founded in 1950 that does about $500 million a year. He left in February 2026.
He built Harper’s construction technology department from nothing in 2016, BIM and VDC included, and ran it for five years.
He opened and ran the Asheville office, led 30 people, and carried more than $60 million in active projects.
Projects on the public record
- ABCCM Transformation Village
- 100 beds of transitional housing on a 24-acre site.
- Buncombe County schools
- Nine renovations, with kids in the buildings while the work went on.
- The Wesley Grant Center
- A $6.7M recreation facility for the City of Asheville.
“I come from construction. I understand job cost reports, WIP schedules, AIA billing, and why sub compliance matters to your bonding capacity. This is not a tech pitch. It is an operations system built by someone who reads the same reports you do.”
Lessons
What ten years taught him.
- Information speed
- Information speed beats construction speed.
- Difficult clients
- A difficult client is an under-informed client.
- Ego
- Ego is the most expensive material on a job.
- Coordination
- Coordination beats headcount.
- Technology
- Technology amplifies the communication culture you already have. It does not fix it.
He watched BIM, drones and sensors show up with a budget and leave with a pilot report. Each one asked people to change how they work. That’s why this practice starts with AI, which meets people in the email they were already writing.
Method
We fix what's broken before we build anything new.
In that order. Nobody gets sold a custom build before the basics work and the people trust the tool.
Foundation
Get the basic systems working before anything smart sits on top.
Training
Show your people what these tools do and where they fall down.
Broad tools
Put in the tools that help every role, from the super to the controller.
Custom work
Then build the pieces only your operation needs.
Every engagement opens with an operator interview.
A recorded conversation, 45 to 60 minutes. The prompt is “walk me through last week.” We listen for where the hours go. You get back an opportunity map, a recommended first win and a phased roadmap.
Ways to start
Three ways to start.
Good
Find the first win.
- Discovery
- AI maturity read
- Training workshop
- Project-management quick wins
Better
Build it and get your people using it.
- Everything in Good
- Workflow implementation
- Adoption support
Best
Custom builds and a retainer.
- Everything in Better
- Custom builds
- Retained support
One thing on this ladder stands alone: the $2,500 AI training workshop. It’s the cheapest way to find out whether any of this is for you.
Pattern
What a real engagement looks like.
One client, not named. We don't name clients, and that's covered below.
- The client
- A founder-run specialty subcontractor working western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina. Fifteen to twenty W-2 employees, about six jobs going at once.
- The trigger
- Their controller left and the owner ended up doing the books himself.
- How we started
- On the owner's personal low-risk books. The company operating file waited until he trusted the work.
- The scope
- Four workstreams: office and project management automation, crew scheduling, a bookkeeping agent working against QuickBooks Desktop, and inventory with a bill of materials.
- of hands-on implementation over four months
- 120 hours
- software purchase they didn't have to make ($27,000 license plus $15,000 onboarding)
- $42,000
- hours a week one client now spends on bookkeeping, down from 8. Over $60,000 a year.
- 8 to 1
Privacy
We don't name clients.
You just read a case with no company name on it. That’s on purpose and it’s a standing rule. Your job cost, your margins and your bid strategy are your edge, and we don’t put them in a deck to win the next engagement.
Next step
Start with the interview.
Forty-five minutes on how last week went. You leave with an opportunity map whether or not we ever work together.