Is your business ready for custom software?
Most businesses that ask this question aren't ready yet. That's not a sales pitch dressed up as honesty. It's actually the answer. Here's a way to tell from where you sit.
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Xzist Digital
Notes · Field reports from UK construction
Notes. From the field.
Short pieces about software, systems, and what actually happens when an office team tries to run a £1m–£20m construction business. No thought-leadership. Just things I keep seeing on the inside.
AI in construction admin: what it actually does well (and how to set it up properly).
Most of what's being written about AI in construction right now is sales material. There's a smaller, more useful question underneath the hype: where does AI add real value in a construction office, and how should it be set up to do so safely?
Read postWhy your office manager is your most expensive software developer.
Your office manager is a software developer. They might not call themselves one. But if you look at what they actually do all week, a significant chunk of their job is building, fixing, and maintaining software inside your business.
Read postThe five spreadsheets most construction businesses run on (and where each one breaks).
Walk into any mid-market construction firm and ask the office team to show you how the business actually runs. You won't be shown software. You'll be shown spreadsheets. Here are the five that quietly run a firm, and where each one starts to fall apart.
Read postThe real reason your quotes take a week to go out.
Ask any mid-market construction MD how long it takes them to send a quote, and they'll tell you a number that's longer than they'd like and shorter than the truth. The hidden queue is the cause.
Read postWhat custom software actually looks like when it's done properly.
The phrase “custom software” has a bad reputation in mid-market construction. The reputation is earned — but the failure mode isn't bespoke itself. It's a specific way of doing it that breaks predictably.
Read postThe ten-module platform problem.
Most mid-market construction firms are paying for software they barely use. The bit they don't use is hidden inside the same quarterly invoice as the bit they do, which is why it's so easy to miss.
Read postWhy I won't sell you a CRM.
A civil engineering MD called me last spring. He'd been told he needed a CRM. Three different IT consultants had told him the same thing. None of the problems he wanted solved were CRM problems.
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