Construction Solutions

There is a number that should keep every contractor up at night, and it is not a bid total or a change order amount. It is 83.7%. That is the percentage of construction company bankruptcies caused by financial factors — not bad workmanship, not losing bids, not market downturns. Cash flow problems, insufficient capital, and excessive debt. The work was there. The skills were there. The systems were not.

I have spent fifteen years watching this pattern repeat. A framing contractor in Phoenix who could build anything you drew on a napkin but could not tell you which of his twelve active jobs was actually making money. A commercial GC in Melbourne running $8 million in annual revenue through a combination of QuickBooks, three spreadsheets, a shared Dropbox, and his wife’s kitchen table every Sunday night. A specialty sub in Denver who lost his lien rights on a $340,000 project because the preliminary notice deadline passed while the paperwork sat in somebody’s truck.

The construction industry generates $3.7 trillion in annual revenue in the United States alone. It employs over seven million workers. And 81% of its companies have fewer than ten employees. These are not enterprises with IT departments and dedicated software budgets. These are businesses where the owner is simultaneously the estimator, project manager, superintendent, safety officer, bookkeeper, and sales team.

The data on what this costs is staggering. Construction professionals spend 11.5 hours per week — more than a full workday — just looking for project data. The average firm uses 11 different applications to manage a project: Dropbox for files, Excel for budgets, email for bid management, text messages for field updates. Rework caused by poor communication and bad data costs the U.S. construction industry $177 billion annually. Nearly half of all rework — 48% — comes from poor collaboration between parties who are supposedly working on the same project.

And yet, 46% of construction companies spend less than 1% of their annual revenue on information technology.

The gap between the top-performing contractors and the rest is not talent or trade skill. It is systems. CFMA data consistently shows that “Best-in-Class” contractors — defined by top-quartile performance — achieve 10-12% net profit margins while the industry average sits at 5-6%. The difference is what the industry calls the “Admin Tax”: the hours paid for non-billable work like searching for files, chasing subcontractor documentation, reconciling spreadsheets that nobody trusts, and reconstructing daily reports at 9 PM because the super was too busy managing trades to write anything down during the day.

The construction industry does not need another project management platform. Procore, Buildertrend, CoConstruct, and ServiceTitan all do their jobs well. What contractors need is the connective tissue between those tools — the automation layer that bridges the gap between what happens on the job site and what needs to happen in the back office. The layer that turns an email from an architect into a tracked RFI, a signed change order into an updated schedule of values, a completed inspection into a billing milestone, and a subcontractor’s certificate of insurance into a prequalification status.

That is what we build at Neudash. Not a replacement for your project management software. Not another app your superintendent has to learn. An automation layer that watches your email, monitors your calendar, tracks your deadlines, and handles the administrative work that eats into your margins — so you can focus on building.

The pages that follow cover the twelve most expensive administrative problems in construction, from change order management to subcontractor prequalification. Each one includes the specific workflows that solve it, the math on what it costs you today, and the tools you already use that can be connected to eliminate it.

Because the difference between the contractors who survive and the ones who join that 83.7% statistic is not whether they can build. It is whether they can run a business while they are building.