There are five categories of tools we need to think about for estimating: - Take-off software - Estimating software - Document management - CRM and bid tracking - AI tools Some platforms do all of them, some only do one small, specific thing. Do I think you need five expensive construction-specific platforms? No. A smaller contractor could cover most of this with a purpose-built take-off tool, Excel, SharePoint or Google Drive, a simple CRM, and Claude or ChatGPT. As your team grows, dedicated estimating software or an all-in-one platform might make more sense. The important thing is choosing tools that suit your process and let you export your data. I broke down the different options in this video: https://youtu.be/AyL3tXCtz18 What does your current estimating stack look like? Which tools would you recommend?

Here's mine: A construction programme is your methodology expressed through time. The Gantt chart is only the output. The actual work is deciding how the team will deliver the project: - Break the scope into activities with clear owners. - Sequence the work from the required milestones. - Calculate durations using quantities and realistic production rates. - Identify the critical path and low-float activities. - Optimise the work that can actually change the completion date. Crashing critical-path work usually costs more. Fast-tracking it introduces more risk. Doing either to non-critical work will not bring the completion date forward. Do I think a planner should build the programme alone and hand it to the site team? No. The people delivering the project need to help build the methodology and commit to it. This is my attempt to explain it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QahPnqB4UHo

I really enjoyed making this video and it explains a concept a lot of people don't get A $10 million construction contract can require nearly $2.8 million in cash to deliver. A 5% cost overrun can turn a 2.3% net margin into a 2.2% loss. That is what makes construction business economics so difficult. Revenue can grow quickly, but most of the money passes straight through the business. Meanwhile, you fund labour and materials before the client pays, tie up cash in security and carry the delivery risk. Do all projects have these exact numbers? No. Payment terms, upfront purchases, retention and security all affect the cash position. But every contractor needs to understand three things: profit, risk and the maximum cash deficit. A profitable project can still put a contractor under if the business cannot finance it. I broke down the numbers using a $10 million project here: https://youtu.be/CPZLE2kn0Mg

Hey everyone, I am Mike, currently working a 9-5 as a construction site engineer in Greece. Within the next few weeks I plan on launching my own renovation's business which eventually I want to scale into a construction firm. I have experience in coding, AI and Machine Learning and I found this community because Tim is the only resource I found online that actively uses Claude code and LLMs in his actual workflows. My goal is to standarize processes across my future business using LLMs, optimize delivery time and maximize my profits.

Which model is best at reading and understanding construction drawings? @Josh Turner and I just launched an AI benchmark for construction tasks. If you've not come across a benchmark, it's a way to score AI models. There's benchmarks for software engineering, legal, maths, etc. For our benchmark, we went through multiple sets of large construction drawings and created a database of questions and answers (Very time-consuming). Questions like "how many footings are in the slab" or "what are the cable tray specifications. We then scored each model based on what percentage of questions they answered correctly and the cost of the analysis. So far, we've tested 9 recent mods. GPT 5.6 won. Surprisingly, Opus 5 and 4.8 both beat Fable 5. One caveat: we tested the models via the API, so you would likely get different performance (almost certainly better results) if you used the harness (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) We'll be running and updating this for every new model that comes out. We will also be adding more domains to our analysis - take-offs, estimating, scheduling, etc. We've got come up with some pretty interesting ways to test them. Check out the results here: https://contractoros.build/benchmarks/