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. The pricing varied from £400 a month to £40,000 up front, but the recommendation was identical: get a CRM, fix the business.
He turned over £10m and ran a tight office team of four. He sent me a list of the problems he wanted solved. None of them were CRM problems.
Quotes were sitting in someone's drafts folder for six days at a time. Extra work agreed on jobs was getting done but never invoiced, because nobody was tracking what had been agreed. Nobody knew which version of the subcontractor paperwork was the right one. Equipment hire was on a whiteboard. He had a clear sense of his pipeline (which jobs were quoted, which were likely to land, who was a repeat client), but it lived in his head and a battered notebook, not in a tool.
I told him I wouldn't sell him a CRM.
I want to be careful here because there's nothing wrong with CRMs in general. If you're running a sales-led business — recruitment, financial services, software, anything where the deal pipeline is the business — a good CRM earns its keep within weeks. HubSpot. Pipedrive. Salesforce. They all work. Real businesses run on them.
The thing CRMs do well is model a sales pipeline as a series of stages: lead, qualified, proposal, negotiation, won. Then the deal closes, the customer moves into “won,” and the CRM mostly stops caring. Someone else takes the handover and delivers the work. The CRM job is done.
For a construction firm, that's exactly the wrong shape.
You care about your pipeline too. You care a lot. You know which quotes are out, which are likely to come in, which clients are due to start a job in three months, which long-term supplier agreement you're up for renewal on, and which repeat client hasn't been in touch this year and probably should be. That's all pipeline. That's all valuable. A CRM can track it.
But the “won” stage isn't the end of your problem. It's the start. Once the job is won, the real work begins, and that's where the margin lives or dies. Extra work that doesn't get billed. Information bundles for subcontractors that go out of date. Equipment on hire for a week longer than anyone tracked. Final sign-off slipping by a month because nobody owned the list of outstanding fixes. Money held back at the end of the job that never gets chased. None of that is what a CRM is designed to manage. CRMs were built for businesses where the deal is the product. For construction, the deal is the beginning of the product.
So when an IT consultant sells a construction MD a CRM, what's really happening is they're selling software that handles maybe 20% of the operating picture — the pre-won part — and leaves the bit where the business actually makes or loses money completely untouched. Worse, the CRM becomes another system the office team has to maintain on top of the spreadsheets they were already drowning in.
I've worked inside worktop businesses and alongside construction firms for years. I grew up around the trade. I know what an office manager actually has on her desk on a Tuesday morning, and it's a mix of pipeline notes and operational chaos in roughly equal measure. The pipeline bit is uncomfortable but manageable. The operational bit is what's killing her.
The MD I mentioned earlier ended up with something properly built. Quotes and pipeline, scheduling, equipment, site communications, extra-work tracking, all in one place. His office manager went from copying numbers between four spreadsheets to copying nothing. Quote turnaround dropped significantly. The pipeline view he previously kept in his head now sat in a screen anyone could open.
I'm a solo operator. I take on a handful of clients a year, and every one is a custom build. So me telling you I won't sell you a CRM isn't a sales gimmick. I genuinely won't. I don't resell HubSpot. I don't have a Pipedrive partnership. If you came to me and what you actually needed was a CRM, I'd tell you, and I'd point you at the right one.
Here's what usually happens. Someone tells me they need a CRM, I sit with their office team for two days, and within four hours we both know it's something else. A tool that handles quoting and tracks jobs from first conversation through to final sign-off. Or a way to manage all the documents and give subcontractors somewhere to log in. Or a proper system for tracking and approving the extra work that gets added to jobs. Usually all three at once, with the pipeline view as one piece of a bigger operating system.
The reason “we need a CRM” is the first thing said in these conversations isn't because the business needs one in the SaaS sense. It's because the IT consultancy industry has spent fifteen years telling construction firms that's what fixes things, and “CRM” is the closest word in that industry's vocabulary for “a tool that helps me run my business.” It's the wrong word, but it's the only one being offered.
If you've already bought a CRM and it's gathering dust, you're not alone. If you're being pitched one right now, ask the salesperson how it handles extra work, equipment tracking, and subcontractor compliance. If their answer is “those aren't really what a CRM does,” they're being honest. The next question is whether you should be buying a CRM at all.
That's it. That's the post.
If any of that sounds familiar, get in touch.