Core Contracting

Challenge

Core Contracting’s sytems were not designed to manage a large amount of projects simultaneously: Estimating in Excel resulted in a big and cumbersome workbook, while converting a job’s budget into a proposal required a monotonous series of copy and pastes from Excel to Word. Keeping clients happy and projects moving forward required numerous phone calls and meetings per week, while punch list management was disorganized and reactive at best. When multiplied by their growing amount of jobs, the team’s workload was unsustainable.

Solution

ConstructionSuite and ConstructionOnline provided Core Contracting a centralized system that automated many of their manual tasks: Estimators create individual budgets for each project, then client proposals are generated from that estimate in seconds. ConstructionOnline is cloud-based, serving as an easily accessible hub for budgets, change orders, and punch lists alongside ClientLink Portals where clients access project information at any time. Together, these tools brand Core Contracting as a professional and organized builder while freeing up time to focus on the most important task at hand: exceeding client expectations from day one.

Humble Beginnings

Meet Chris Walsh, the founder of Core Contracting. This friendly man grew up in a small fishing village in Newfoundland, Canada. According to Chris, most families in rural Canada were either fishermen or carpenters. Luckily for Chris, he was born, hammer in hand, to a family of talented carpenters. He spent his childhood and teenage years collaborating with his dad on a variety of construction projects which solidified the core tenets of integrity and quality that Chris has carried with him to this day.

When he first ventured into the industry, Chris found himself building one home at a time which he sold at completion - Rinse and repeat. He used a combination of desktop applications to manage these projects, including Excel to create estimates. In a given workbook, each tab represented a different job. This method performed well when building one or two jobs in a given time frame, but as his reputation increased and more projects came into the pipeline, his Excel workbooks became big, cumbersome, and difficult to use.

For schedules, he utilized MS Project which provided a road map for a job’s tasks, but failed to offer transparent information to the client. Instead, schedules were a silo of information only visible to internal company employees. If a client questioned a particular piece of the job such as the date for material delivery or updates on the expected completion date, a meeting or phone call was necessary. With multiple houses simultaneously underway, this could result in five or more extra meetings for Core Contracting per week on top of any time to be spent at the jobsite, cutting into precious time that could be spent on managing incoming leads or existing projects.

While numerous meetings were expected when starting out, Chris knew he needed a more accessible and robust system to manage multiple projects and client interactions. Since implementing ConstructionOnline and ConstructionSuite in 2015, Core Contracting has grown from a small residential builder handling twenty projects per year to one of Canada’s most reputable elite home builders with five specialities, managing over fifty projects during a calendar year, totaling more than $8 million dollars in annual revenue.