Procore Implementation Mistakes to Avoid: Every Procore Conversation From Construction Hot Takes, Before Groundbreak
The most common Procore implementation mistakes have little to do with the software itself: contractors buy modules without a clear reason, settle for basic roles and permissions, skip rollout and training, and connect Procore to their ERP and other tools without mapping how the data actually has to flow. Ahead of Procore Groundbreak, Construction Hot Takes pulled every Procore conversation from past episodes into one 32-minute supercut, with clips from Episodes 3, 11, and 46.
The hosts start with whether Procore is right for your company at all. It’s the most versatile and most expensive construction management platform on the market, a Swiss Army knife, but it isn’t built for every contractor, and many companies discover their real problem is a budgeting and change order knowledge gap Procore was never going to fill. From there, they lay out what to do after you buy: name champions, set roles and permissions, load a couple of projects, and get the core documentation tools working before touching financials.
The back half comes straight from the trenches: an e-signature integration that created more work instead of eliminating a job, a Procore, Sage, and Kojo stack where commitments never draw down and sales tax won’t sync, an AI invoice-matching tool that hit API limits, and why best-in-class versus best-in-breed choices drive integration pain. The takeaway is simple: map your data flow before you buy.
In This Episode
Procore is the most versatile and most expensive construction management platform on the market, and it isn’t a fit for service-focused contractors or every project type.
Most “Procore isn’t working” calls trace back to a budgeting and change order knowledge gap the software was expected to fill.
Start with why you bought it, then name champions, set roles and permissions, and load a couple of projects with drawings, specs, daily reports, and photos before connecting financials.
In a Procore, Sage, and Kojo stack, processing invoices through Sage Paperless leaves commitments open in both Kojo and Procore and doubles up costs.
Map your data flow, including commitments, invoices, payments, and sales tax, before you choose an ERP or bolt on a best-in-breed tool.
“It’s probably working the way it was designed. You just didn’t understand how it was designed to work, and you’re trying to make it do something it doesn’t want to do.”
What are the most common Procore implementation mistakes?
The most common Procore implementation mistakes are buying modules without a clear reason, setting only basic roles and permissions, skipping a rollout and training plan, and connecting Procore to an ERP or other tools without mapping the data flow first. The software usually works as designed; the expectations and setup are what break down.
Is Procore the right software for every construction company?
No. Procore is the most versatile and most expensive construction management platform on the market, but it’s built for project-based work. It isn’t a fit for every contractor or project type, and companies that mainly do service work rather than construction projects are often better served by other tools.
What should you do first after buying Procore?
Start by defining why you bought it and what it needs to fix. Then name your Procore champions and administrators, set roles and permissions, and load a couple of projects with drawings, specifications, daily reports, photos, and RFIs. Treat connecting financials to your ERP as a separate project once the basics work.
Why do Procore, Sage, and Kojo integrations break down?
They break down when invoices are processed outside the commitment chain. If a contractor uses Sage Paperless for invoices, commitments in Kojo and Procore never draw down, Sage costs return to Procore as direct costs, and spend doubles up. Sales tax also won’t push from Procore to Sage, so the ERP must calculate it separately.
How do you choose an ERP that integrates with Procore?
Map the data flow before you pick. List the needs the ERP must cover, document how commitments, invoices, payments, and sales tax should move between Procore and every other system, and research the available integrations. The goal is to solve roughly 80 to 90 percent of integration problems before you sign, not after.
Can AI automate construction AP invoice matching?
Partly. AI tools can pull open commitments from an ERP like Sage, match incoming invoices to them, and infer the right job from details like a delivery address. But current tools often can’t write data back into every system at once, so API limits can still force contractors into custom middleware.
Heading to Groundbreak With Procore Questions?
If your team is months into Procore and still not getting the return you expected, or you’re trying to map Procore to a new ERP, Ascent Consulting helps contractors untangle the setup and the integrations before they cost another year.
About the Hosts
Adam Cooper — President & CEO, Ascent Consulting
Jeff Robertson — Vice President, Ascent Consulting
Gregory Gorman — Principal Senior Consultant, Ascent Consulting
Adam Cooper is President & CEO of Ascent Consulting and the author of Build It Better. He spent more than 20 years in commercial and industrial construction before founding Ascent in 2014.
Jeff Robertson is Vice President of Ascent Consulting, with 30+ years of construction industry experience. He leads much of Ascent’s work on ERP and tech-stack evaluation, Procore implementation, and integration.
Gregory Gorman is Principal Senior Consultant at Ascent Consulting, with 20+ years of financial, operational, and leadership experience in construction, development, and construction management.
Is Procore Working the Way You Expected?
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Episode Transcript
[0:00] Narrator: Heading to Procore Groundbreak, or just trying to get more out of Procore? We pulled every Procore conversation from Construction Hot Takes into one video. These are clips from past episodes, so if one grabs you, the full episode is linked in the description. Let’s get into it.
[0:26] Intro: [Theme music]
[0:33] Jeff: Today we’re going to talk about what’s so great about Procore. Procore’s a big player in the industry, we know that, and we get calls all the time: How can I better leverage Procore? Should I get Procore? Do I need it? Are there other alternatives? So today we get into that, and we should have a couple of differing opinions and different takes on it.
[0:56] Adam: What’s so great about Procore? I take a lot of calls from Wall Street, from investment groups that are looking at this as an investment opportunity. Of course, I’m not allowed to disclose any of the questions they ask me, but what I usually tell them is Procore is the best Swiss Army knife with the most tools on the market right now for construction. It’s probably the premier choice. It’s the most expensive construction management software out there, but it’s also the most versatile and the most functional. Now, it’s not for everybody. It doesn’t—
[1:28] Jeff: It’s absolutely not right for everybody.
[1:30] Adam: It is not right for everybody. It does not work for certain types of contractors. It doesn’t work for certain types of projects. It doesn’t work for companies that do service as opposed to construction projects. It is a project management software. It has some parts that work phenomenally well and some parts that maybe aren’t as strong as other software. And they’ve also got this great ecosystem of third-party apps that integrate with it, that—
[1:55] Jeff: It’s virtually infinite.
[1:57] Adam: I’ve likened it to the Apple App Store. When iOS came out, that’s Procore. And now they’ve let all these people write apps that talk to Procore and augment its versatility and its functionality.
[2:11] Greg: Some better than others.
[2:14] Adam: Yeah. And from what I can tell, Procore isn’t curating the marketplace. They’re letting anybody write an app and sell it, and I think Procore probably gets a percentage of those sales. So they’ve created an ecosystem that’s similar to the App Store, in my mind. Now, I don’t have any of this validated with Procore. I’m speaking from my own experience, my own knowledge, my own insights, and what I’ve extrapolated. But what do we get calls about for Procore? “I’ve had it for a couple of years,” or “six months, and we’re just not using it as well as we thought we would.” Or “We just got the financials module, but we haven’t connected it yet. We don’t know how to turn it on.” Or “We connected it, but it’s not really working.” Which is really interesting to me, because they’re already doing change orders somehow. Now they’ve got Procore, and they just don’t understand how to do a change order in Procore. It seems like there’s some foundational knowledge in the background they don’t have, and they thought Procore would solve that knowledge gap. It doesn’t. It just makes it worse.
[3:25] Jeff: I agree with that. That’s completely right. I’m going to make a broad generalization here, but it comes down to understanding forecasting. If they weren’t doing that before, it’s a new thing.
[3:41] Adam: I’m going even pre-forecasting. I’m saying I don’t think they understand budgeting. You have to build a budget, and then you do a change order. The change order to the client impacts the contract value, but it also has an underlying cost budget impact. There’s a cost for that change order and revenue associated with it. I feel like they don’t understand how change orders work with budgeting, and that makes me think they don’t even understand how budgets work. They work off of an estimate, but they don’t do what we’d call project accounting, which is tying it back to the ERP. But Procore can give you that functionality whether it’s tied to your accounting system or not. I just think there’s an underlying knowledge gap. They already weren’t doing budgeting properly, they got Procore, and that just amplified the problem. Now they have another system that’s automated and forces them to do it the correct way for it to work, and they get stuck. They’re like, “We don’t understand how this works.”
[4:46] Greg: I think it’s a really good point. You guys said it: Procore is a Swiss Army knife. And this is what I always say to finish that thought. If Procore is a Swiss Army knife, that’s great, but sometimes you don’t need a flint to start a fire.
[5:04] Jeff: You don’t need a spoon and a fork.
[5:05] Greg: Sometimes you just need a knife to cut a piece of rope, and that’s all it’s for. The question is whether you know how to use it for the one thing you need it for, which is budgeting, keeping track of costs. Now, if you’re on the PM side and you’re just using it for daily logs or putting photos into it, there are a lot of different levels of Procore use that we see. And I think the number one call I get on Procore is, “We just got this new module. We got talked into this new module. I have no idea how it works.”
[5:43] Adam: Yeah, why’d you get it?
[5:44] Greg: Exactly. Why’d you buy it? “Well, they said I needed it.” Let’s talk about it.
[5:49] Jeff: Well, there’s also that easy-button concept: if I get this module, I can get out of the projects, or our financials are suddenly going to work. Boop, there, it’s done. Which is, as we all know, there’s no easy button.
[6:06] Adam: We should just keep putting it all in the same system. If we just put it all in one system, then at least it’ll all be in one system, and we won’t have five softwares to manage.
[6:16] Jeff: To be fair, the configuration and setup of Procore is what we’re talking about, but this could be true for literally any software. They all have a different logic, a different way they think about things. If you don’t have a base understanding of that, you can make decisions during the implementation and configuration phase that you’ll come to regret. Not because you made a bad decision, but because you didn’t know the second- and third-order knock-on effects. It’s really spending time thinking about permissions, for example.
[6:51] Greg: I was just going to say, I think a good example is permissions. You can set up basic permissions, or maybe they walk you through basic permissions, and then you need a different level and you never change it. Now you have someone in your system who shouldn’t be there, and someone who needs access who doesn’t have it. We all know Procore is robust. Robust is a great word. If you look at that permissions page and go three levels down, it is long and deep. You need to know those things, because you don’t know what you don’t know.
[7:24] Adam: The other thing is, Procore five or ten years ago was a much simpler, easier interface. As they’ve added more functionality, it’s gotten more and more complex. Now, if you’re a brand-new user who just got Procore, you don’t have an easy system you can eventually expand into. You’ve got a very complex system you have to figure out.
[7:47] Greg: And you’re paying a lot for it, like you said.
[7:50] Jeff: You want to get a return now. Right now.
[7:51] Greg: You want an ROI on Procore. And I think it’s fair to say, and tell me if you guys disagree, that Procore’s model is not holding your hand after the fact. Procore’s model is: we have amazing software we’ve built over time, we have great partners, we have integrations, we give you what you need, and then we say go do it. And there’s a lot to learn, a lot of knowledge you need to make Procore be exactly what you want it to be.
[8:24] Adam: Right. And Procore is not in the business of helping all their clients maximize their system. That’s why they built out the certified consultants network over the last four or five years, and why we joined up, because we can provide that level of expertise. That’s what we do. We bridge the gap between “they sold you the software and got the basic setup” and “you’re using it fully, it’s integrated into your daily operations, your whole team’s using it, and you’re really getting maximum benefit.”
[8:53] Jeff: So you bought Procore. Now what?
[8:56] Adam: Oh, great. I have the orange easy button, right? I’m just going to press that orange Procore easy button.
[9:04] Greg: Yep, and everything’s going to be fixed.
[9:05] Adam: There are a lot of questions to ask. I think the first is: what modules did you buy outside of project management, which is at the core? If you bought financials, are you going to connect it to your ERP? What other technology do you have, what other software do you have, and do you want to integrate and API them? But I think the first thing you’d want to do is go through a stand-up implementation: assigning roles and permissions, giving people access to the system, and making sure they’ve got the right access.
[9:37] Jeff: I’m going to back you up a step. The bigger question is, what are you using it for? That leads to which modules you bought and whether you’re connecting it to your ERP. But the real question is, why did you buy it? What did you think this was going to fix for you? What magic was supposed to happen when you bought this, that’s going to suddenly happen when you turn it on?
[10:00] Adam: Hopefully, before you spent five, six, or seven figures, $10,000, $100,000, or a million dollars on Procore depending on your size, you already figured out how you’re going to use it at a 30,000-foot view. Now you have to actually start using it.
[10:18] Jeff: Agreed.
[10:19] Adam: So typically, you want to start identifying who your champions are going to be, your administrators of the system. Then start defining roles and permissions and giving people access. Then pick a couple of projects to load in and start with the core stuff: drawings, specifications, daily reports, photos. Start setting the job up and letting people use the system. “We’ve got the drawings in there. Let’s start walking around, taking some pictures, doing daily reports.” The basic blocking and tackling of project management, the documentation side. RFIs can go in there. Now, if you’re going to connect it to your financial system, that’s a whole side project, because you’ve got to get cost code systems in. You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to use prime contracts, what tier of change orders you’re going to use, who’s going to have what permissions, and how the budgets work. Do you need custom budget views? Do you have reports you need? That’s a whole rabbit hole we could go down. But so you bought Procore, now what? You’ve got to get the basics going, just like any other system, and get the team trained on how to use it.
[11:34] Jeff: We talked about this maybe once before, I can’t remember if it was here or in a blog, but you mentioned the easy button, and so many people approach it that way. So you’ve got it. Now what? Here’s how not to do it: you buy it, hand it off to somebody from an executive level, never talk about it again, and expect them to understand why you have it in the first place.
[12:09] Greg: I was just going to say, both of you guys are saying the same thing. So you bought Procore, now what? It’s blocking and tackling, but are your people trained in using the system? Do they know how to turn it on? Do they know how to log in, enter data, set up a new project? It doesn’t come with an easy button. We’re joking about it, but you have to be able to say my people can even use it, much less use it well, use it right.
[12:43] Greg: There are training programs that have to be built.
[12:45] Jeff: My point on that was that we get calls all the time that say, “I got Procore three months, six months, a year ago, and it doesn’t work.” Or, “My people aren’t using it, and I’m thinking about getting rid of it. Can we turn this boat around? Can you fix it?”
[13:05] Adam: “We’re only using a small bit of it, like a Dropbox.”
[13:12] Jeff: “It doesn’t work.” I disagree. It’s probably working the way it was designed. You just didn’t understand how it was designed to work, and you’re trying to make it do something it doesn’t want to do. Not saying we can’t help you, but there’s a misalignment of expectations. Or “my people aren’t using it,” which probably means there was absolutely no thought put into rolling it out, or training, like you mentioned—
[13:32] Adam: Yeah, you have to roll it out.
[13:33] Jeff: And explaining why we did this in the first place. What’s the goal?
[13:37] Adam: The other thing, to answer “now what?”: invest in some continuing education for yourselves. Go online. There are self-guided training and certification courses. They’re pretty basic and very general. They don’t teach you how to customize it or adapt it to your organization, but they do teach you what the buttons do.
[14:03] Jeff: And what it’s supposed to do.
[14:04] Adam: How it’s supposed to work, and they give you some examples. And they keep that stuff pretty fresh and updated as they update the program.
[14:11] Jeff: I think that’s a mindset, though. Who wants to spend 20 hours going through certification programs? You want to just start playing with it. We’re in construction. Just give me the tool. I’ll figure it out.
[14:20] Adam: Well, I’ll try to give you the instructions anyway.
[14:22] Jeff: Give me the new saw. I’ll figure it out. I didn’t cut my leg off, I promise.
[14:29] Jeff: Six months to a year later, they’re calling us: “Can you help me figure out why none of this stuff is talking to each other and where all the data is breaking down?” I’ve got three of these projects right now.
[14:39] Adam: Yeah, we’re in the midst of working through one right now. So I thought it’d be fun for us to talk from the trenches, real life. What’s one of the projects you’re dealing with right now? Without telling too much about them, what kind of contractor are they, what size, what did they buy, and what snags are they hitting?
[15:01] Jeff: I’ve got one right off the top. We actually talked about this yesterday. We have a general contractor that was struggling with Procore in a couple of different ways, but this specific example was a third-party electronic signature integration.
[15:18] Adam: Yeah, you said they were using DocuSign.
[15:21] Jeff: Or Adobe Sign, one of the two. They were led to believe they should set it up one way. The connection was working, but it wasn’t working the way they expected. They wanted their prime contract and a bunch of attachments: “I need you, as the subcontractor, to initial the scope exhibit. I need you to initial the insurance exhibit,” and so on. And it wasn’t doing that, because they were given a little bit of bad advice, and they didn’t understand the integration, the capabilities of both pieces of software, or the best way to set it up. So the complaint was, “We’re doing more work now than we were before we got these two pieces of software, and this was supposed to eliminate darn near a whole job.” Instead, the person doing it is doing more than they ever were. That’s an excellent example of an integration that worked, but didn’t work the way they expected, based on some expectations and a little bit of bad advice.
[16:27] Adam: Got it. I’ve got two clients with almost the exact same problem right now. The ecosystem is either Sage 300 or Sage Intacct as the accounting system, Procore as the project management system, and Kojo as their procurement software. The first challenge is that Kojo is where they’re issuing purchase orders and subcontracts, and that’s got to go somewhere. If it goes into Sage, you can’t push that back into Procore and create commitments in Procore. But if I route Kojo into Procore, I can create the commitment in Procore and then push it into Sage. So it can work in that direction. The challenge comes when they process invoices. If you process the invoice in Procore, you can push it to Sage, but then Kojo shows an open commitment that never got an invoice.
[17:27] Jeff: Right. You start the commitment in Kojo in the first place, right?
[17:29] Adam: Right. But it’s one-to-one: you can pull in a batch of invoices, but then you process them one by one in Kojo. Each time you process an invoice in Kojo against a commitment, you can route it into Procore, and that can push into Sage. However, both of them want to use Sage Paperless to process their invoices. And if you do that, Kojo and Procore both show open commitments that never draw down, and the cost from Sage shows back up in Procore as direct job costs, not costs against commitments. So the commitment never goes away, and now you start doubling up on expenses. Now you have to create calculated columns in the budget to artificially draw down the commitment.
[18:12] Jeff: Does Kojo have AP functionality?
[18:14] Adam: It does, and it does a three-way match with a field ticket.
[18:18] Jeff: Okay. So why Sage Paperless? What makes that so…?
[18:22] Adam: Sage Paperless is a way to do them in batches and load them in bulk, and it has more coding fields. And Sage doesn’t play great with the integrations. What we’re finding is, if you create the commitment in Kojo, you can push it into Procore, but then you have to go into Procore and hit the Send to ERP button manually. So not only do you have to create the purchase order in Kojo, you’ve now got to go into Procore and click another button to get it into Sage.
[19:08] Jeff: So you have to flush the valve in Procore to get it into the ERP.
[19:10] Adam: Correct. You have to send it to the ERP. You can automate past Procore’s holding cell, the purgatory, for commitments and invoices, so that’s nice, but you still have to hit that button. For a company that creates five purchase orders a day, not a big problem. When you create 100 purchase orders a day because you’re a $150 million company, that’s a lot of times going into Procore to click the little Send to ERP button. It’s an extra step.
[19:35] Jeff: It’s like you just have to go in there once an hour or on some regular basis, right?
[19:40] Adam: Now either the project manager is buying everything in Kojo and then going into Procore to push them all, or a procurement department is creating them in Kojo and then has to go into Procore to push the button as well. And now I’m starting to talk to Procore about whether we can automate that Send to ERP button. If the thing’s approved, just send it. Some type of customization or workflow we’re going to try and design. But they don’t think about the way the data needs to flow to at least streamline as much as possible. Another problem I’ve got is sales tax. In Kojo, you can set it up to calculate sales tax, and then I can feed that into Procore. But Procore doesn’t have a way to push sales tax over into Sage. The integrations don’t support sales tax. So now you’ve got to get the ERP to calculate sales tax on its own and hope it matches up with Kojo. And if the sales tax varies because you’re in a county or city or state, whatever tax level you’re dealing with, how do we make sure the sales tax is calculated at the project level or on the purchase order level? We’re dealing with all these little technology minutiae, but they jam up the works and stop these integrations from working seamlessly.
[21:03] Jeff: We’ve got a project where we’re in the selection stage, looking for an ERP across a platform. It’s a little different but similar. We’re attempting to do that data flow work now. We’ve identified our needs: What do we want this for? How do we think this is going to work? How do we want it to flow? You don’t always get what you want, but let’s at least start there. So we’re researching the integrations between Procore and different ERPs, and maybe some third-party integrations, to draw out the data mapping. Maybe not super high level, but not all the way in the weeds, to help us make that decision. The idea is, let’s get hopefully 80% of those problems solved before we even choose. We know what we’re getting into, and we can at least identify, “Okay, there’s this much we have no idea how to solve.” Maybe it’s more like 90/10, but we get all this other stuff, so let’s go, and we’ll solve those things later.
[22:14] Adam: Yep. Now, one of my clients has introduced another software which has AI, and what it’s doing is trying to simplify the AP process. It’s querying Sage every night and pulling all open commitments into a data table. Then, as they process invoices, it’s trying to match the invoices with the open commitments it pulled out of Sage. If it can match them, it pushes them back into the ecosystem as approved invoices or flags them with any anomalies. Kind of an AI match. But it’s doing this in another platform, and the problem is the AI is almost smart enough to figure this out most of the time, but it’s not quite smart enough yet. And it can’t push the data to everything, into Sage and into Kojo and into Procore.
[23:11] Jeff: You only get one.
[23:12] Adam: We’re bumping up against API limitations, so now we’re talking about custom middleware to solve some of these issues. AI is not quite there yet. I know it’s coming up in every conversation. We used to be able to do this just by writing scripts: if this, then that; if this and this, then do this other thing. That’s straight-up automation, and the AI is helping us write those scripts. So now we’re trying to use AI to infer: it’s this vendor, and this was the delivery address. That delivery address matches a job. The vendor didn’t put the job number or the PO number on it, but we can let the AI figure out that the address matches a corresponding project, so it’s probably for that project, and then check whether that project has any open commitments. That’s what the AI is starting to figure out. But they got sold this AI solution that, again, was not ready and is not fully capable of solving their issues.
[24:14] Jeff: You hope it’s only the 10% things, the stuff that was so low on the list of what you wanted, but now you’re dealing with it and it’s the most important thing. But there is a way to avoid this, or at least get it down to that 10%. And this is a plug for us: you should ask us to help you before you make a decision. So often we get this call: “Here’s what we’ve done, and it doesn’t work.”
[24:49] Adam: Yeah, and we’ve been dealing with it for a year. And we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on payroll to get these things working.
[24:57] Jeff: A lot of times, the individual pieces are working exactly as they’re supposed to. Their expectations of how they’re supposed to work don’t align. They bought it for whatever reason. Maybe they didn’t do the research, or maybe they just didn’t listen. “No, no, no, it’s going to work. I’m going to make it work. I’m going to jam that thing in there.” So often it starts with that expectation: what do I want it to do, what do I think it should do?
[25:23] Adam: Well, I think this also goes back to the software companies and the sales side of it. They make promises that the software can do what they claim it does.
[25:36] Jeff: Given the following 1,200 conditions that they don’t talk about.
[25:38] Adam: And a lot of times it can do exactly what you want it to do and what they said it could do, but getting that to push into another system, the integration, is where all this stuff breaks down. It’s not USB. It’s not the same plug-and-play port on every software. They all have their own APIs, their own ways to talk to their data tables, their own read and write permissions. I’ve not seen anything that’s a completely wide-open API.
[26:09] Jeff: Well, that’s a challenge too. Let’s say you found a system, let’s say an ERP, and you’ve got 15 things you need. Not want, need. You need inventory. It has to do service, project-level accounting, discrete invoices. But when you do your demonstration, you look at it and go, “I don’t love how that handles inventory. I think there’s a better solution.” Or maybe it’s AP automation, or service. It’s one of the tertiary things, not core AP and AR, but something you know you need for your business. If you use the native solution, you don’t have to deal with an integration, but it doesn’t do enough. You have a third party over here that works exactly how you want it to. And that’s where you get to the integration problem.
[27:03] Adam: It is. I’ve heard companies toss around the terms best-in-class and best-in-breed.
[27:10] Jeff: Oh, okay. I hadn’t heard the best-in-breed part.
[27:11] Adam: So best-in-class might be the best ERP against other ERPs. Best-in-breed is a specific solution for a specific problem or a fraction of your business: the best service software out there, but not a full ERP, because the ERP doesn’t have a great service solution. So you buy the ERP that’s best-in-class, then buy the service software that’s best-in-breed as a subset, and then you try to integrate those. We’re in the throes of it. The technology is moving so fast, and there are all these new softwares coming online. I learned about two new project management softwares in the past seven days. My cousin, who works in the financial industry, asked me about an investment opportunity with a new construction software I hadn’t even heard of. I had to go research them. They’ve only been around for a couple of years, but I’m doing my own homework to see: should we set up a demo? Should we talk to the owner? Should we introduce this to any of our clients yet?
[28:28] Jeff: Right. That’s a tough one, because you’ve got these great solutions. Traditionally, our rule has been that you have to have been out there a while, one of those best-in-class or best-in-breed tools recognized for years in the industry, with a track record and a stable user base. Somebody is probably inventing something in their garage right as we speak, but they need to go through several rounds of fundraising and a couple of years of proving the concept.
[29:04] Adam: That was the call I got from my cousin: “They’re going out for a round of funding. Is this something our company should invest in?” Because Procore is down the road on the investments. The IPO was years ago, and it’s got a $10 billion market cap right now. So they’re asking what else could potentially play in that same field. I think we need to start being open to newer, evolving technology as consultants. Just because they’ve only been around for two years doesn’t mean they’re not a great solution. Let’s start evaluating some of these newer ones for fit, for purpose, and for integration capability. I think there’s an opportunity there. I think the market’s going to continue to expand with solutions providers before it contracts.
[29:53] Jeff: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. There’s a contraction coming, but I don’t see it coming soon. Procore is eating up what it can eat up, and the Autodesks are going to eat up what they’re going to eat up. But it seems like it’s still expanding faster than it’s contracting. We’re still on the front side of that curve.
[30:16] Adam: Which is just going to lead to, unfortunately, a lot more integration woes, or the need to take a slower, more measured approach: “It’s not just the commitment I have to deal with. I have to deal with all the things that go around a commitment.” Or it’s not just the progress billing in a G702/703 I have to create. How do I get that into my accounting system, or back into my project management system? When the check comes in, how do I make sure I’ve got something to receive it against? How does that payment data flow back through so I can see days outstanding? All those subsets of data, that’s the stuff a lot of companies skip over or glance over. They’re focused on the core and not the little peripheral stuff, and that’s what winds up eating up all the time in these failed integrations.
[31:10] Jeff: You can hardly blame them. They’re busy running their business, trying to grow the business. They’ve got to win the work, build the work, and manage the work they’re doing every day. It’s a big investment, but you can hardly blame them for going, “This looks good, 10% effort, let’s go, we’ll figure it out later.”
[31:38] Adam: Not recommended.
[31:40] Jeff: They don’t realize the downstream impacts it can have on their staff.
[31:45] Adam: All right. That’s what I wanted to talk about today.
[31:48] Jeff: That was a good one. It wasn’t so bad.
[31:53] Adam: All right. Well, thanks for joining us on Construction Hot Takes. We’ll see you on the next episode. Find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
