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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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
Kill The 20-Hour Takeoff Before It Kills Your Margin
Episode 80
Friday, August 28, 2026 • Duration 41:41
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.
Give Homeowners Value Before They Call You: The Claude Toolbox
Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 42:34
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
The Roofing Contractor Who Put His Back Office Inside AI
Episode 78
Thursday, August 13, 2026 • Duration 48:00
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.
The Preconstruction Step That Kills Change Orders Before They Exist
Get Your Crew to Actually Use AI | Andrew Nuhfer, AKN Interiors
Monday, June 29, 2026 • Duration 32:43
Steal the Crew AI Adoption Checklist (free, the exact moves from this episode): beyondthebid.co
Most builders adopt AI in a weekend. Their crew never touches it. Andrew Nuhfer cracked the part everyone gets wrong: getting a field-bred team of carpenters to actually run the tech.
Andrew built AKN Interiors into a 15-person Pittsburgh remodeling shop in four years, with no tech background. In this conversation he breaks down how he made software the standard instead of an optional good idea, how his 50-year-old director of construction went from typing with two fingers to doing everything the office staff can, and the Claude and JobTread "budget factory" that turns a recorded sales call into a budget in the customer's own words. Most $3M builders are still hand-entering data that AI could be writing for them. Andrew shows you what to fix first.
If your team ignores half the tools you pay for, this is the episode that fixes it.
Most builders think their next profit leak is in the field. It's not. Chad Eslinger built custom homes for nearly 30 years before he found the two leaks no software can reach, and they both start with the client.
Oregon's contractor board says 95% of complaints come from poor communication, not poor work. That gap is where margin dies: change orders nobody saw coming, schedules blown by one late selection, disputes that started as a simple misunderstanding. Chad's fix is contrarian. Instead of buying more software, he "upgrades the client" with an education system he hands over before pre-construction, roughly 98 minutes of video and a printed binder that turns a first-time homeowner into the experienced client every builder wishes they had. Here's what most $3M+ builders miss: he gives it away whether they sign or not, and it's won him nearly every competitive bid he wanted. We also get into giving each project its own AI "brain" the client can question before they panic.
If your systems are dialed and you're still leaking margin, this is the conversation your competitors hope you skip.
[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.
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.
- Follow KCS on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KCsImprovement
- Follow KCS on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kcsimprovement/
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.
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.
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.
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