Beyond the Bid | Practical AI for Builders

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Working 70-hour weeks. Margins at 9%. Booked solid but broke. Beyond the Bid brings builders, trade pros, and construction tech leaders together to unpack the systems that separate thriving companies from those stuck competing on price. We explore practical AI—real impact on workflows, estimating, and project management. We tackle cash flow chaos, scope creep, and the trap of being your own bottleneck. Operators, tech innovators, industry veterans—every episode delivers something you can implement tomorrow. Stop chasing bids. Start building systems. Tuesdays → beyondthebid.co

  1. Sep 25

    The GC Who Built His Own Software So His Crew Can Clock Out at 4:30

    Find where your business is leaking time and margin in 7 minutes, before your competitors do: https://www.gofirstconsulting.comThomas Kurtz has been in the trades since he was 12 and would still rather bang nails than sit at a computer. So when his apps "kind of worked but didn't really work," he didn't buy another one. He built his own with Claude, one friction point at a time, and now runs Vici Construction without a full-time person in the back office.Most $3M builders try to fix admin overload with another hire or another subscription. Tom went after the place where bad data starts: anything that depends on a person typing the right thing in.His crew clocks in with one button because the job is already on their schedule. His vendors answer a normal email and the reply lands in his system, with no portal and no login. When he quotes an assembly, it becomes the material list, the purchase order and the field's cut list in one step.None of it worked because of the software alone. It worked because Tom wrote his process down first, fixed the data entry before anything else, and kept building in small pieces he could test and break. If you've been waiting for the right app to fix your week, this is the conversation to watch.A 25-year tradesman shows how he coded his crew out of the 60-hour week.OTHER THOMAS KURTZ RESOURCES 🔗Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kurtz-08658b31Reach Tom at Vici Construction: tom@viciconstruction.com [confirm Tom is OK listing this publicly]The cost data Tom benchmarks against: Craftsman Book Company, https://www.craftsman-book.com [VERIFY]🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the BidInstagram: @beyondthebidLinkedIn: [Beyond the Bid LinkedIn URL]Website: https://beyondthebid.coEmail: [Beyond the Bid email]⏱️ Timestamps [00:00] The builder who wanted his crew home by 3:30 [00:34] Why a steady 40-hour week is the whole point [01:53] Using Claude as a board of advisors, then as a coder [07:37] How vendors answer RFIs without ever logging in [09:30] One assembly becomes the material list, PO and cut list [19:42] The screenshot trick that stops AI from guessing [20:48] Running the whole business out of one in-house system [28:49] Onboarding a new hire with one button [31:36] Where to start if you're on Buildertrend today [33:56] Fix the data entry first: the rule behind every build [37:04] Why job-site photos save you from poking holes in drywall [40:25] Stop pricing framing by the square foot [41:45] Tom's advice: just try it, and go break itThis content is for educational purposes only and is not legal, tax or financial advice. © 2026 GO First Consulting. All rights reserved.👍 Like it if this made you rethink your back office. 💬 Comment with the one friction point you'd fix first. 🔔 Subscribe for a new systems breakdown every week. 📤 Share it with a builder who's still running 60-hour weeks.

  2. Sep 24

    Why Your Construction Handbook Needs an AI Policy

    Free AI policy template for construction companies (from Kelly): https://www.eyeonautomations.com/blog/construction-ai-policy-template You paid for Copilot, locked it down, and sent a training link. So your team is pasting bids, contracts and P&Ls into free Claude instead, and nobody at the top knows it's happening. Kelly Stephens spent 14 years in construction operations at PulteGroup before starting EyeOn Automations, where she audits, trains and builds AI systems for construction and real estate companies. She explains why AI rollouts stall after the tool gets handed over, why she gets the whole team to one baseline before anyone builds an agent, and the one document every builder should write before anything else. Show notes, timestamps and the template: https://beyondthebid.co/podcast/kelly-stephens-ai-adoption-policy CHAPTERS 00:00 Where your company data is really going 00:39 Locked-down Copilot sends your team to free ChatGPT 02:37 Baseline skills before anyone builds an agent 03:41 Walk in as a partner, not the job cutter 09:25 The vibe-coded app nobody locked down 11:29 Why the client's own build beat hers 12:21 Everyone wants AI takeoffs, so automate around them 21:48 How to hire a developer when AI writes the code 34:14 Start with an AI adoption policy GUEST Kelly Stephens, CEO, EyeOn Automations https://www.eyeonautomations.com FIND YOUR MARGIN LEAK IN 7 MINUTES Take the free GO First AI Diagnostic: https://www.gofirstconsulting.com GET ONE SYSTEM A WEEK The Beyond the Bid newsletter, built for builders and remodelers doing $1.5M to $20M: https://beyondthebid.co/subscribe Beyond the Bid is hosted by Grant Fuellenbach of GO First Consulting. Real systems, real numbers, and AI tools that builders actually use. #construction #AIforbuilders #remodeling

  3. Aug 28

    Kill The 20-Hour Takeoff Before It Kills Your Margin

    Try Handoff free for 7 days, full platform, no sales call: 7-Day Trial Dmitry Alexin is not a software guy who wandered into construction. He spent ten years at the intersection of machine learning and building, starting on the early team at Atoms, the construction technology company founded by Uber's Travis Kalanick. He now runs Handoff with 70 people behind him and hundreds of millions in residential projects moving through the platform every month. Here's what he says out loud that most people in this industry won't: for a hundred years there were exactly two ways to bid a job, and both of them took something from you. Ballpark a square foot rate and you're fast, but some of those jobs eat your margin and you find out in month three. Go line by line, stick by stick, and you're right, but the homeowner already signed with the guy who answered in a day. Fast or accurate. You didn't get both. Most $3M builders have quietly accepted that as the cost of doing business. Dmitry spent roughly six years building the thing that breaks it, working with hundreds of estimators, thousands of contractors and some of the largest material suppliers in the world. What comes out the other side isn't a faster spreadsheet. It's your judgment moving back up to where it belongs: markup, client fit, and whether you want this job at all. He also gives away the exercise to run before you spend a dollar on any of it. Log every block of work for one week. Feed it to an AI. Ask where your time actually went. Then put $500 an hour on it and see how you feel. The story about the garage door around 14:00 is the one that'll stick with you. OTHER DMITRY ALEXIN RESOURCES 🔗 - Start your 7-day Handoff trial: [HANDOFF TRIAL URL] - Follow Dmitry for AI-in-construction tips: instagram.com/dmitry_from_handoff/ - Follow Handoff: instagram.com/handoffai/ - Get the Handoff newsletter: handoff.ai 🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the Bid Instagram: [BTB INSTAGRAM] LinkedIn: [BTB LINKEDIN] Website: beyondthebid.co Email: grant@gofirstconsulting.com TIMESTAMPS [01:27] What an AI teammate actually does that software can't [04:05] Why the labor shortage hits the office, and your crew [05:10] The one bottleneck that decides whether you grow [06:22] Why your ChatGPT takeoff came back wrong [07:32] The smart intern problem, explained [09:22] What happens when you bring your estimator into it [11:20] The companies going hardest on AI are hiring more [12:56] The contractor who was about to close his doors [14:03] The garage, and what 20 minutes in a car gets you [16:02] Nobody starts a company to run back office [17:46] The two ways to bid, and what each one costs you [19:32] Where your judgment goes once the math is handled [21:41] How to run a time audit in one week [23:54] Putting $500 an hour on your own time [24:26] The four D's: delete, defer, delegate, do [26:56] Ten years in AI and construction, from Atoms to H1 [29:01] Why residential first, and not commercial [34:28] Where to start if you've never touched any of this Beyond the Bid is produced by GO First Consulting. The information in this episode is for general educational purposes and is not financial, legal or tax advice. Guest statements reflect their own experience and are not endorsed claims. Consult a qualified professional before making business decisions. © 2026 GO First Consulting. All rights reserved. If this saved you an hour, hit like so more builders find it. Drop your biggest estimating headache in the comments and I'll answer it. Subscribe for a new systems breakdown every week. And send this to the builder you know who's still doing takeoffs at 11pm.

  4. Aug 27

    Give Homeowners Value Before They Call You: The Claude Toolbox

    Play Homeowner Bingo, the free tool Keith built in 20 minutes that outperforms everything else KCS ships: https://kcsimprovement.com/homeowner-toolbox/ Keith Crabtree came into his father's 40-year-old design-build company to run marketing. Two and a half years later he's the reason KCS Improvement has a shelf of free homeowner tools, a newsletter that ignores its own email platform's limits, and an automation that will not let a client go quiet. He has no coding background. Most builders build lead magnets to capture emails. Keith gives his away and asks for nothing, on purpose, because the homeowner noticing they weren't asked is where trust actually starts. He walks through the Homeowner Toolbox on screen: bingo, a permit quiz, a remodel personality quiz, an aging-in-place readiness assessment. Each one is a single HTML page Claude writes, hosted on its own tracked landing page, live in fifteen to twenty minutes. Then he shows the other half, which is the part most $3M builders miss. The same principle runs inside the job. A routine scans every active JobTread job each morning for a customer touchpoint and posts an internal flag on anything past three business days. Snooze a job and it creates its own follow-up task, due the day the snooze ends, so nothing quietly disappears. Here's what the top 5% know: the two places builders lose homeowners are before the first call and in the silence during the job. Keith closed both with tools he built himself. If you've been waiting for proof that this works in a real remodeling company, this is the episode where somebody shows the actual screens. OTHER KEITH CRABTREE RESOURCES 🔗 - Connect with Keith on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/keith-crabtree-5793b095 - See what KCS Improvement is building: kcsimprovement.com - Follow KCS on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KCsImprovement - Follow KCS on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kcsimprovement/ 🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the Bid Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondthebid.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantfuellenbach Website: www.gofirstconsulting.com Email: grant@gofirstconsulting.com TIMESTAMPS [00:00] Why interactive tools beat a contact form [01:30] Coming into a 40-year-old family design-build company [04:12] The AI jump that made two-year-old attempts worth revisiting [07:08] Letting the weekly bottleneck meeting decide what gets built [07:47] Inside the team: 6 to 10 people, most labor subcontracted [12:10] Homeowner Bingo, walked through on screen [14:18] The Homeowner Toolbox and why time is labeled [15:06] The aging-in-place readiness assessment, room by room [17:07] Fixing the tracking gap with a landing page per tool [19:31] Free, ungated, and why they refuse to capture emails [20:25] Twenty minutes from idea to live on social [22:03] Building newsletters in Claude and pasting them into Flodesk [24:24] JobTread automated workflows and the forms feature [27:31] The client silence detector, scanning jobs every morning [28:32] The snooze that creates its own follow-up task [36:36] You don't need a marketing coordinator or an ops manager [40:39] Building the 2027 pipeline in Q4 instead of chasing jobs Beyond the Bid is produced by GO First Consulting. The views expressed by guests are their own. Nothing in this episode constitutes legal, financial or tax advice. © 2026 GO First Consulting. All rights reserved. If this saved you time, hit like. Tell me in the comments which tool you'd build first. Subscribe for a new systems breakdown every week, and send this to the builder who still gates everything behind a form.

  5. Aug 13

    The Roofing Contractor Who Put His Back Office Inside AI

    Get the free GO First AI Diagnostic and find your #1 margin leak in 7 minutes, before your competitors find theirs: https://www.gofirstconsulting.com Sam Taylor didn't come up through the trades. He came up through graphic design, art direction, and a marketing business that the '07-'08 crash took out. Then he looked at construction and saw a hole where the professionalism should have been, and walked in. A decade later he runs Taylor Exteriors & Construction out of Iowa, doing roofs, siding, decks, and additions across the whole exterior envelope, and he just landed a several-million-dollar senior living roof. Not on price. On how the estimate was structured. Here's what most contractors miss. Sam's argument is that a proposal is a math equation, and the equation is sitting in somebody's head. Stories high, bundle coverage, what the code requires, what margin you want. He got that out of his people's heads and into a system, and now his crew handles storm damage with one click: the system pulls the photos and the carrier's estimate, cross-processes them, finds what's missing and what code requires, and builds the supplement out with line items and justifications in a couple of minutes. That changed the shape of his company. He processes invoices and material pulls on demand, so he knows his under- and overbillings on any job in real time instead of chasing them weeks later. He built a digital board of directors that hands him ten marketing ideas and ten structural ideas every morning. And in his own words: he doesn't need as much of a back end, which is exactly how a small operator competes against bigger companies paying that overhead. He also draws a hard line on what AI shouldn't touch, and it's the part most consultants get wrong. If you're running $1M to $15M and wondering what this actually does for a contractor instead of what the ads claim, this is the one. OTHER SAM TAYLOR RESOURCES 🔗 - See TaylorGuard and what Taylor Exteriors builds: https://taylorext.com - Follow Sam's journey on LinkedIn: search Sam Taylor, Taylor Exteriors - Taylor Exteriors on Facebook 🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the Bid - Website: https://www.gofirstconsulting.com - LinkedIn: Grant Fuellenbach - Instagram: @beyondthebid - Email: grant@gofirstconsulting.com TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Introduction to AI Automation 04:15 Meet Sam Taylor 07:40 AI in Proposal Writing 13:07 Career Transition 15:00 Drone Technology 17:35 Digital Management 26:45 Tracking Project Health 35:00 Client Relationships 46:00 Industry Market Trends 48:15 Final Thoughts DISCLAIMER: The content in this episode is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute business, financial, or legal advice. Views expressed by guests are their own. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions for your business. © Beyond the Bid / GO First Consulting. All rights reserved. Like it if a line in here changed how you're going to run next week. Comment with the one process you'd hand off first. Subscribe if you'd rather not be the last contractor in your market to figure this out. Share it with the builder whokeeps saying he'll get to it later.

  6. Aug 7

    The Preconstruction Step That Kills Change Orders Before They Exist

    Walk your own floor plan at full scale before your next project gets priced: https://www.projectivestudios.comEvery client who walks into this studio finds 10 to 15 items they want to revise on plans they already approved. Not change orders. Revisions caught before anything is ordered, poured, or framed. Jeff Metzger spent 15 years building wind farms, gold mines, healthcare facilities, and high-end custom homes, and he got tired of watching a small oversight on paper turn into a permanent problem on site.So he built the only projection studio in the country with three adjacentprojection walls. Architects, builders, and their clients walk a plan at 1:1 scale on a 2,300 square foot floor, stage furniture on it, wheel a chair up to a reception desk, and find out what the drawing set never told them. In this episode Jeff walks through the Children's Museum project that planned four people behind a grand entrance desk and could not fit two once it hit the floor at full size.The part most builders miss is what happens next. That desk fix touched the soffit above it, the cloud ceilings tied into that soffit, and electrical rough-ins already poured into concrete. Jeff's rule from 15 years on site: any change in construction moves at least four or five other scopes. He also breaks down the five or six door swing conflicts caught on a typical plan, against a 12-week lead time on a door right now.No Revit file. No 3D model. No new software to learn. The same PDFs and JPEGs already going to your clients and your subs, sent a day ahead. One hour on the floor replaces about a dozen design meetings where nobody decided anything.Design partners who run one session put it in their proposal for every job after that.OTHER JEFF METZGER RESOURCES 🔗- Book a full-scale walkthrough of your plans: https://www.projectivestudios.com- See what a session actually looks like: https://www.instagram.com/projectivestudios- Monthly open house and networking event: https://www.projectivestudios.com🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the Bid- Instagram: @beyondthebid- LinkedIn: /in/grantfuellenbach- Website: https://www.beyondthebid.co- Email: grant@gofirstconsulting.comTIMESTAMPS00:00 Introduction00:45 What is Projective?01:45 Value and Risk Mitigation03:15 Real-World Use Cases08:40 Advanced Projection Setup12:25 The Booking Process15:15 White Glove Client Experience24:35 Live Demo and Walkthrough32:35 Closing and Future Events---The information in this episode is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or professional construction advice. Always consult qualified professionals for your specific situation. Guest claims and figures are the guest's own.© 2026 GO First Consulting. All rights reserved.If this saved you one change order, hit Like so another builder finds it. Drop the most expensive thing you've ever caught late in the comments. Subscribe for weekly systems breakdowns, your competitors already have. Send this to the partner who still thinks the plans are fine.

  7. Aug 5

    The Router Table Rule | How Ted Cut a 3 Hour Estimate to 45 Minutes

    Find the margin leak in your business before your competition finds theirs: www.gofirstconsulting.comTed Sihpol got beat to his own number by a client with a laptop. He quoted a waterfront renovation at $1,100 a square foot. A week later that client sent him a 21-page report he'd built with AI, priced at $1,200 to $1,300, with three scenarios and a projected return on each. Ted's words: "I think I shorted myself 100 bucks a square foot."Ted runs Renaissance Partners out of Fairfield County, Connecticut. Four self-performing carpenters, 99% residential remodeling, almost every job within ten miles of his house. He's 58, he came out of Wall Street, and he says he got excited the day his second monitor fired up on the first try. He is not the guy you'd expect to be running AI estimating.Here's what most builders get wrong. They open a chat window and ask what a screened porch costs. Ted does the opposite. His model already knows his open-cell and closed-cell spray foam per square foot, what he charges to hang crown and run trim, that he works in Fairfield County, and the margin he wants, not the markup. So the output comes back as line items he pastes straight into BuilderTrend. An estimate that used to cost him three or four hours now takes an hour and a half. He's won two projects with it. On the last one, the proposal was viewed 30 minutes after he sent it and signed the next morning.He also rebuilt his entire subcontractor agreement in one sitting, merging an insurance carrier's version with the AIA master into a protected template that auto-fills the sub's name once. He sent it out over a weekend and got three signatures back, including from a title guy who'd been stonewalling him for months.And he's honest about the ceiling. He still runs his spray foam math longhand for 20 minutes and uses AI to check it, never the other way around. His framing: everybody can buy a router table. Buy the cheap one and you'll spend the rest of your life sanding chatter marks off raised panels.If you're pricing work in 2026 and assuming your clients aren't running the same tools, this is the episode that changes that assumption.OTHER TED SIHPOL RESOURCES 🔗- See the portfolio, including the 12,000 sq ft 1932 Georgian restoration: https://www.renaissancepartnersnc.com/- Follow the work and send Ted a DM: https://www.instagram.com/renaissancepartnersnc🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the Bid- Instagram: @beyondthebid- LinkedIn: Grant Fuellenbach- Website: www.beyondthebid.co- Email: grant@gofirstconsulting.com🚀 Powered byGO First Consulting — www.gofirstconsulting.comTIMESTAMPS00:00 Introduction00:42 Business Overview01:31 Leveraging AI for Efficiency05:31 AI-Driven Pre-Construction12:31 Visualizing Client Projects16:49 Managing Subcontractor Agreements24:25 Client Relationships and Referrals35:18 Future of the Trades41:17 Closing ThoughtsDISCLAIMER: The content in this episode is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or professional business advice. Pricing, margin, and contract practices discussed reflect the guest's own business and market. Consult your own advisors before making decisions for your company.© Beyond the Bid / GO First. All rights reserved.If this gave you one tool to fight back with, hit LIKE so another builder finds it.Drop a COMMENT with the one task you'd hand off first.SUBSCRIBE for weekly systems breakdowns. Your competition is already watching.SHARE this with the builder who's still doing takeoffs by hand on a Sunday.00:00 Introduction00:42 Business Overview01:31 Leveraging AI for Efficiency05:31 AI-Driven Pre-Construction12:31 Visualizing Client Projects16:49 Managing Subcontractor Agreements24:25 Client Relationships and Referrals35:18 Future of the Trades41:17 Closing Thoughts

  8. Jul 16

    Turn Your Best PM's Expertise Into a Training System

    Steal Precision's design-first Project Roadmap before your next bid: https://buildwithprecision.com/design-and-development/Kevin Peloso can't fake 25 years of field experience. So he built a system that extracts it. He co-founded Precision Design & Build out of a real estate career, lost $50K on his first $330K of revenue, and rebuilt the company around operators instead of optimism.Most $3M builders never measure the number this episode is built on: slippage. The benchmark says 5% is good and 2% is great; Precision found 13.7% leaking through small PM decisions while clients stayed happy and reviews stayed five-star. Kevin's fix is not a hiring spree. It's an extraction pipeline: a question map, a Plaud recorder on the table, Claude structuring the transcript into an SOP, and a biweekly course where his partner Vinny trains the whole PM bench. The same system widens their talent pool, cuts keyman risk, and feeds recruiting and client content in one motion.If your margin engine lives in one person's head, this episode is the succession plan.OTHER KEVIN PELOSO RESOURCES 🔗Follow the course build in public: https://www.instagram.com/kpelosoPrecision's projects and process: https://www.instagram.com/precisiondnbPrecision Design & Build: https://buildwithprecision.com🎯 Get in Touch with Beyond the BidInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondthebidLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantfuellenbach/Website: https://beyondthebid.coEmail: grant@gofirstconsulting.comTIMESTAMPS00:00 Introduction01:14 Industry Communities05:00 Company Origins07:31 Operational Transformation19:53 Tech Stack23:15 Knowledge Transfer34:37 Talent Development46:49 Scaling and Future54:26 ConclusionEnjoyed this one? Like the video, drop your slippage number in the comments (or admit you don't track it), subscribe for weekly builder systems breakdowns, and send this to the partner whose brain runs your company.This episode is for educational purposes and reflects the guest's experience. It is not financial, legal, or accounting advice. © 2026 Beyond the Bid. All rights reserved.

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About

Working 70-hour weeks. Margins at 9%. Booked solid but broke. Beyond the Bid brings builders, trade pros, and construction tech leaders together to unpack the systems that separate thriving companies from those stuck competing on price. We explore practical AI—real impact on workflows, estimating, and project management. We tackle cash flow chaos, scope creep, and the trap of being your own bottleneck. Operators, tech innovators, industry veterans—every episode delivers something you can implement tomorrow. Stop chasing bids. Start building systems. Tuesdays → beyondthebid.co

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