I wanted to ask about experiences with Upwork since it seems like a popular platform. I've been at it for about 2-3 weeks now, sending proposals consistently. Already spent $300+ on connects. Results: 1 response, 1 call, zero delivery, zero paid clients. For those who've been through this, is it still a viable option in 2026? Or am I wasting time and money? Would love to hear your honest experiences.

Hi everyone, great to be here! I'm Craig and I've been a Contracts Director for a supply and installation company for the past 10 years. I’m joining this community because I really want to connect with like-minded construction professionals and draw on your real-world experiences to help improve my current processes. My number one goal right now is streamlining. I'm specifically looking for new, highly efficient ways of tracking projects from start to finish. Currently, my main tech stack consists of G Suite and Salesforce, but I’m incredibly interested in exploring how to integrate AI into my workflows to save time and reduce friction. If anyone has successfully brought AI into their project management, or has any favorite integrations/workflows that play nice with Salesforce and G Suite, I would absolutely love to hear about them! Looking forward to learning from you all and sharing what I know along the way. What is everyone else using to track their projects right now?

93 clients in 2 months. Now our estimating system is the bottleneck. 🚧🤖 We launched a construction estimating business in the Czech Republic roughly 2 months ago. So far: → 93 paying clients → Almost entirely construction companies → And we’re still just getting started. We basically act as an outsourced estimating department for contractors. A client sends us drawings, BoQs, specifications, PDFs, Excel files, photos, etc. We then: 1. Analyze the entire project 2. Determine exactly what needs to be priced 3. Extract quantities, materials and technical requirements 4. Find missing information / conflicts between documents 5. Build the bill of quantities / estimate 6. Price it using Czech construction cost databases + real market pricing 7. Finalize it in professional estimating software 8. QA the estimate and send it back to the contractor 9. We already use Claude, AI agents and our own custom-built internal app to help with this. And it works. But now we’ve reached the point where sales isn't our biggest bottleneck anymore — the estimating system is. We want to take what we have and build a MUCH better AI-assisted estimating workflow. Not a ChatGPT wrapper. Something that can reliably help us process real construction projects every single day — understand hundreds of pages of documentation, extract information, catch conflicts, prepare quantities, assist with pricing and eventually automate a large part of the estimating workflow while keeping human verification where it matters. I’m looking for someone in this community who REALLY understands one or more of these: - AI + construction estimating - Claude / LLM agent workflows - document & drawing analysis - quantity takeoff automation - estimating software - building reliable AI systems for real-world workflows Ideally, I’d love to find someone who could first look at what we've already built, tear it apart, tell us what we're doing wrong, and then potentially help us build the next version.

Before you run another ad or ask for another referral — do this free check on your own Google listing. Takes 5 minutes. Most contractors who run it are surprised by what they find. Check 1 — Your last review date When was your last Google review posted? If it's been 6+ weeks, your Maps ranking is already dropping. New customers searching your area are seeing competitors first — even if your work is better. Check 2 — The competitor gap Search "[your service] + [your city]" right now. Look at the top 3 results. How many reviews do they have vs you? Every 10-review gap = roughly 1–2 lost jobs per month just from ranking. That's before anyone even looks at your price. Check 3 — Your unresponded reviews Any 1-star or 2-star reviews sitting unanswered? Research shows 88% of customers read business responses before making a decision. An unanswered bad review isn't just one lost job — it's every person who reads it and picks someone else. The math nobody talks about: 5 missed or lost jobs/month × $400 avg job = $2,000/month That's $24,000/year lost — not from bad work, but from a Maps listing that's slowly falling behind. The contractors winning right now aren't just better at the job. They've figured out what happens after the job — the review, the follow-up, the rebooking. What does your Maps listing look like right now? Drop your star rating and when your last review came in — curious what others are working with.

Here's mine: A construction programme is your methodology expressed through time. The Gantt chart is only the output. The actual work is deciding how the team will deliver the project: - Break the scope into activities with clear owners. - Sequence the work from the required milestones. - Calculate durations using quantities and realistic production rates. - Identify the critical path and low-float activities. - Optimise the work that can actually change the completion date. Crashing critical-path work usually costs more. Fast-tracking it introduces more risk. Doing either to non-critical work will not bring the completion date forward. Do I think a planner should build the programme alone and hand it to the site team? No. The people delivering the project need to help build the methodology and commit to it. This is my attempt to explain it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QahPnqB4UHo