How do you use Excel? Weekly Newsletter · Construction Contractors Hub

How do you use Excel? Weekly Newsletter

I’ve seen $200m+ projects run on Excel. And it works

Hey everybody,

I’ve been ignoring my email newsletter, and I wanted to put some time and effort into restructuring and improving it. It had become secondary to my YouTube videos.

So I’ve decided to give it a big reboot.

Each week I want to deliver three things:

News - keep you up to date with the latest developments in AI and construction
Inform - share some insightful stat, insight or study that changes the way you think
Work - deliver one perspective, process or demonstration that improves the way you work

I have two goals for this:

Encourage people to use the massive amount of free resources in Contractors Hub. I’ve added tons of sample projects, tutorials, templates, guidebooks, and I’d love to encourage people to use it.
Build a newsletter that distils everything I’m learning

I'll try to keep everything very short and to the point.

Obviously, if you don’t want to receive them, just click unsubscribe below

And if you want to comment or follow the discussion, you can comment along on the accompanying post each week:

News: What happened this week

Lots of new models (as always). Sonnet 5.5 appears to be the standout. Topping our drawing analysis and take-off benchmark, and it’s really cheap to run. Seems like a great model.
ChatGPT Dots dropped. From my testing, it is a worse version of GrokBot. GrokBot is great btw; I have been using it every day.
A construction contractor’s AI roll-out exposed huge document-control problems. The biggest challenge to the roll-out was conflicting file names, duplicate documents and unclear revisions. I have had the exact same experience experimenting with ChatGPT/Claude co-work. File names and folder structures matter. Quite an interesting article: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/ai-doesnt-fix-data-problem-construction-need-unified-language/831774/

Inform: Spreadsheets are actually your SOPs

Everybody in construction loves spreadsheets. The format and flexibility is hard to beat. You can use them for scheduling, contract management, and estimating.

An interesting study found that most effective spreadsheets get developed collaboratively. Multiple people in a company contribute to them.

This means colleagues pass on their business knowledge through Excel. That means, through your templates, you can actually accumulate judgement.

For example, my estimating workbook contains a template of indirect costs. I add to this over time.

The key point: you shouldn’t think of a spreadsheet as a workbook but rather a process that you build on over time.

That’s fundamentally different to software that you put data into and follow somebody else’s process.

Work: So how do you build good templates

Start with the result and work backwards

When I built my estimating workbook, I started with the output I needed: the client’s completed pricing schedule.

Estimating workbook here: https://www.skool.com/construction-contractors/classroom/b8f81dfe?md=b1f5a84aa1dd4c5ba7b4e1ac6038d8c8

Understanding the estimating process helped me work backwards:

The selling price needed direct costs, indirect costs, mark-up and contingency.
Direct costs needed labour, plant, materials and subcontract costs.
Those calculations needed quantities, rates, productivity and duration assumptions.

Each layer told me what the workbook needed to contain. I built worksheets for the calculations and linked their results back to the pricing schedule.

You can use the same approach for a report, dashboard or cash-flow forecast. Define the result you need, break it into its components, then work backwards until you know what information to enter and how to calculate the answer.

Over time, you adjust and customise as required.

That’s how you get a library of high-quality templates.

Hope that helps

Thanks,

Tim

P.S. Want to work with me directly: https://contractoros.build/work-with-us/

P.P.S. Step-by-step roadmap to implement AI in your construction business with pre-built templates: https://www.skool.com/contractor-os

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How do you use Excel? Weekly Newsletter