What an Engagement
Looks Like
A walk-through of the 2-week AI assessment, using a representative Florida builder, so you can see the kind of roadmap you'd get before you ever sign anything.
This is illustrative, not a past result.
It's a composite of the operations we see across mid-market Florida builders, with representative numbers. Your actual opportunities and payback come out of your own assessment — this just shows the shape of the thinking.
The builder
A production builder delivering ~300 homes a year across five active communities, roughly $200M in revenue, around 130 employees. A construction ERP runs the books. Estimating levels bids in Excel. AP keys invoices by hand. Warranty runs on email and a portal. Every month, project accountants rebuild a stack of linked workbooks to close and report.
None of this is broken, exactly. It's just eating thousands of hours a year that don't have to. A two-week assessment across the departments surfaced these opportunities.
What the assessment found — prioritized
Every opportunity mapped to the department that owns it, with an honest read on payback and complexity.
| Opportunity | The manual reality today | With AI | Payback | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bid leveling | 2–3 weeks/cycle comparing 8–12 sub bids across 20+ trades in Excel | Bids parsed, normalized, scope gaps flagged automatically | 2–3 days/cycle | Fast |
| AP / invoice processing | 15–20 invoices/hr keyed by hand, 3–5% error rate | Captured, coded, PO-matched; team reviews exceptions only | 30–50% fewer AP hours | Fast |
| Draw requests | 2–3 hrs each validating pay apps against contracts | Extracted, reconciled, exceptions routed for approval | 20–30 min review | Medium |
| Monthly reporting | ~1 week rebuilding workbooks and narratives | Consolidation + variance narratives auto-drafted | 1–2 days | Medium |
| Warranty | Manual triage; defect patterns found too late | Auto-triage + cross-community pattern detection | Caught early | Medium |
| At-risk closings | Fall-through discovered when it's too late to react | Financing / milestone risk flagged 30+ days out | Save deals | Higher |
Illustrative total: roughly 3,000–5,000 staff hours a year reclaimed across departments — before counting the six-figure errors avoided when a scope gap or a slipping closing gets caught early.
Three of these, in depth
The full roadmap covers every opportunity above this way. A closer look at three of them:
For each new community, estimators hand-enter 8–12 subcontractor bids per trade into a comparison matrix, normalizing scope differences (one bidder includes permits, another doesn't) across 20+ trades. It takes 2–3 weeks, and a single missed exclusion can run six figures.
Every incoming bid is parsed for pricing, inclusions, exclusions, and terms; normalized to an apples-to-apples basis; and returned as a clean matrix with the top bidders per trade flagged and scope gaps called out. The estimator reviews and decides instead of building from scratch.
Clerks open each of thousands of monthly trade invoices, key vendor, amount, GL and cost codes into the ERP, then match against POs. Roughly 15–20 an hour, a 3–5% error rate, and the team is always behind.
Invoices arriving by email are captured, auto-coded from historical patterns, and matched to open POs; only exceptions reach a human. The team shifts from data entry to exception handling and vendor work.
Homeowner requests arrive by email, phone, and portal with no standard format. Coordinators triage by hand, create work orders, and assign trades. Recurring defects across communities surface only after they've become expensive.
Requests are categorized and prioritized automatically, work orders drafted and routed to the right trade, and the homeowner kept updated. Pattern analysis flags when one sub's work is driving disproportionate claims — before it's a portfolio-wide, six-figure problem.
The sequence
Not everything at once. The roadmap front-loads the fast-payback, low-complexity wins — AP and bid leveling first (weeks 1–8) — so the engagement is generating time savings before the bigger builds (draws, reporting, then warranty patterns and sales) begin.
Everything is scoped to pay for itself inside 12 months, and you own what we build — no vendor lock-in, no ongoing dependency.
What you'd walk away with
A prioritized roadmap ready to hand your leadership — whether or not you hire us to build it:
- Specific automation opportunities by department
- Projected time and cost savings for each
- Implementation complexity and estimated investment
- A recommended priority and sequence
Curious what your version of this looks like?
30 minutes, no pitch deck — just a practical conversation about your workflows and where AI pays back first.