Adaptive

Lindsay Beard is the perfect example of what construction finance teams will look like in the next few years: small teams focused on strategic work, agents handling low level execution. She runs the entire finance function at Adams Bickel, overseeing $40m of annual construction volume. After losing an AP assistant on her team, she had to take on the job costing load personally, and it was eating up over half of her week. Instead of searching for another hire, she deployed Adaptive’s job costing agent, working on top of Foundation and Procore. Here’s how it works: 1. Connect your payables inbox, credit cards, and commitments from Procore 2. Our job costing agent pulls all transactions in, assigns cost codes, cost types, projects, and matches to relevant commitments and POs 3. Lindsay and her field team maintain complete control with approval and audit oversight before anything posts to Foundation or Procore 4. A week and a half to process now happens in a day This is the future of how construction finance teams work. Less time catching up, more time getting ahead. Full story linked in the comments.

Most CFOs already drag their WIP into Claude and ask it to spot trends. That gets you the numbers but the story behind them is still stuck in your PM's head. We built a skill for that: the WIP Whisperer. Upload your WIP, and it drafts a check-in to every PM with the specific questions that actually matter (what needs updating, what got done vs. plan, what's next, what's blocking them), captures the replies, and folds them straight back into your WIP memory. That saves you the meeting spent covering the basics, and lets the time you do spend together go toward actually acting on what's happening on your jobs. It also builds a dataset that gets sharper every month you run it. Our CEO, Matt Calvano, wrote more about this last week. Link to his post, and to the skill, in the comments.

We got the chance to host Aimee Roden this week on Builders, Budgets and Beers, and she shared some things worth passing along. She spent years doing books for restaurants before she moved into construction. In a restaurant, you don't tie every transaction to a customer. Nobody's job costing lettuce to a specific burger. You don't need that level of detail to run the place. Construction doesn't get that luxury. Every entry has to be associated with a job, not just the account, not just the product or service, but the customer. That one association is the entire reason you can look at a project and know whether it made money. This is where a lot of contractors get tripped up. They come from a world where the books balance and everything looks fine, and the books do balance, but the reports can't tell them anything useful about any individual job. So they close out, they feel okay about it, and six months later somebody figures out what actually happened. Episode 92 with Aimee Roden is up. Link in the comments. #construction #constructionaccounting

"One of the most complete agent platforms we've seen actually deployed in construction. Maybe the most." That's AI for CRE Collective's take after sitting down with our CEO, Matt Calvano, to see how far "the agent handles the coordination" really goes and watching it place a live call during the demo. Every accounting system before Adaptive was built for the office, or built for the field. Never both.

Ask a construction company who the MVP is. You'll hear design. You'll hear project management. You'll hear sales. You will never hear accounting. Tyler Krueger, Controller at Canopy Builders, puts it plainly in the newest episode of Builders, Budgets,and Beers: "I'm sick of being in the back seat." I get it. But here's where I pushed back on him. If you're in the back seat, you're also the one holding the keys. Nobody is going to walk into the accounting office and invite you into the conversation. That invitation gets earned somewhere else. On a jobsite at 6am with two coffees, asking a super to walk you through what actually happened on that plumbing rough. Tyler does this. He once asked why an outlet was installed upside down. The room laughed at him. Then someone explained it marks the switched outlet. He asked anyway. That's the whole trade. You make them the expert in their world, and they become a lot more willing to let you be the expert in yours. The controllers I've met who get taken seriously in the boardroom are almost always the ones who spend real time in the field. Not because it makes them better accountants. Because it makes them people the field actually trusts. Full episode link in the comments. Controllers, when was the last time you were on a jobsite?

Highspire CEO Paul Atherton, P.Eng. is joined by Reece Barnes from Adaptive for Part 2 of The Net Profit Playbook Series, live August 11. Part 1 covered where profit leaks out of a construction business. Part 2 goes straight at your back office, the estimating, the invoices, AP, AR, and WIP reports eating up your team's week. You will leave with practical insight on how to: - Save hours of your back office team's time without adding headcount - Use your own data to build faster, tighter estimates in real time - Catch profit fade while a job is still running, not at close out 👉 Register now: https://lnkd.in/g7-WFmZc Missed Part 1? Watch the replay: https://lnkd.in/gFw4RKrT #Highspire #ConstructionLeadership #ConstructionBusiness #ConstructionOwners #BuildingWealth #NetProfit #Adaptive+

Alex Wolfe told me his clients come third. Not because he doesn't care about them, but because of the sequence in which he thinks about experience. Employees first. Trade partners second. Clients third. His logic: take care of your people and they take care of your trades. Take care of your trades and the client gets taken care of. Reputation and referrals are downstream of all of it. This logic makes sense from the surface, but, to engrain this into his organization, Alex spent 6 months writing a 15 page document describing Wolfe Homes three years from now as if it had already happened. This exercise created the alignment and buy-in needed for the logic to yield results. Episode is live, link in comments.

Every contractor I know has a job they would rather not talk about. The one that looked fine the whole way through and came in lower than they expected. Usually it is not one big mistake. It is a soft estimate, a few changes nobody priced right, and an office too slammed with paperwork to spot the trend until the job closed. Paul Atherton, P.Eng. and I are doing a free session on August 11 about how construction companies are closing that gap with AI. Three things we are covering: 1. Building estimates off your own historical job data instead of guessing, so bids go out faster and the numbers hold up 2. Catching profit fade mid job, when you can still do something about it 3. Pulling manual data entry off your back office so your team can work on what actually grows the company Part 2 of Adaptive and HIGHSPIRE's Net Profit Playbook series. Tuesday, August 11 at 11:00 AM PST / 2:00 PM EST. Come with questions, we're ready for them. Link to register in the comments