Seamless scaling for project growth

The Challenge

As Spartan Construction Management scaled, it became obvious that achieving revenue and staffing growth ambitions required a platform solution to more effectively manage scheduling and budgets. At the time, those processes were handled through the usual offline methods, from spreadsheets to Word documents. They knew they needed a more solid foundation as they worked through their pipeline, including projects for external customers.

The ballooning portfolio meant a growing roster of owners, investors, and other key project stakeholders who needed regular updates to stay in the loop about how their investments were doing. To navigate this, Spartan needed a communication solution that could effectively disseminate project information across multiple projects.

Their rapid expansion also quickly rendered their patchwork of emails, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets to track and observe finer project details obsolete. As acquisitions continued at a blistering pace, a unified platform solution became a much more attractive option.

The Solution

After initially working with a project management tool still in development on the suggestion of their ERP provider, the company realized they didn’t want to be the guinea pig for an unproven product and didn’t have time to babysit an untested solution. After internal deliberation, the company pulled the plug on its initial software solution and started using Procore.

Procore for Portfolio-Level Forecasting and Budgeting

When Aaron Saunders first joined the company, many of its core processes centered around manual entry in Excel spreadsheets or Word documents. Having worked at large organizations with software solutions that allowed them to dial in every detail down to the per-unit installed level, he knew there was a better way forward.

“I wanted to compile everything we had at the time, Word documents, spreadsheets, smart sheets, and see what we had and where we needed to go. The biggest thing I realized pretty quickly was that we didn't have one good platform to manage everything,” says Saunders.

He knew if the company could successfully meet its aggressive growth goals and complete the growing number of projects in its pipeline, including those for external customers, it’d need a solid foundation upon which to build. So he made his pitch to the executive team about how Procore could help improve their forecasting at the portfolio level.

“Instead of calculating things out as to what we’re going to spend through the end of the project, we just jump into the Forecasting tool. Then we can assign a relationship on what the burn is going to look like. Understanding the process of how one phase code can impact a division and the overall project is very powerful. Knowing how that rolls into the whole portfolio forecast is even more powerful. That impact reflects on the whole construction company, which impacts the real estate development company. It’s all broken down to the smallest level,” says Saunders.

Procore for Supporting ‘Exponential’ Team Growth

As Spartan scaled its annual revenue from $2.5 million to $10 million, the company also needed a way to scale up its team's productivity. Saunders says when he first joined the company, his project manager was juggling a ton of project tasks all on his own.

“Everything from the entitlement support side of project management, to procurement and scheduling, overseeing subs in the field, invoicing, all of it,” he says.

Unsustainable for a growing company, Saunders and the executive team worked on breaking down tasks that could be taken off the PM’s plate that could be assigned to other team members.

“Maybe it was still one person that still did multiple functions, but we’re starting to spread some of that workload around. Now if we look at the team in the corporate office, we have someone just focused on entitlements, someone just focused on preconstruction, and 2 team members focused on initial capital improvements.”

Saunders says this redistribution of tasks and responsibility, which led to “exponential” productivity growth for the team, would not have been possible without Procore.

“Once you spread that workload around, it’s not just a one-to-one relationship on how much more efficient you get, it’s exponential. So as all the team members are relying on each other, that curve just continues to get steeper as we progress and bring new team members on,” he says.

“Procore plays right into that. If we were still building all of our estimates and managing all of our estimates in a spreadsheet tool and trying to compile all of our draw requests into those spreadsheets, printing and compiling PDFs, emailing all those as one document, then analyzing a spreadsheet to see who paid and then get those over to accounts payable, the exponential curve gets flattened.”

Procore for Stakeholder Relations

Spartan’s rapidly expanding portfolio of properties has meant a growing roster of owners, investors, and other key project stakeholders to answer to. Spartan has found success using Procore to streamline the process of recording project details and providing regular updates for stakeholders who want to see the progress their investment is making.

“It’s been really beneficial as a communication tool for our other departments as far as taking and uploading photos. We can review photos and get them to our investor relations team so they can share them with our investors,” says Saunders.

Between more effectively managing a growing portfolio of properties, providing deeper insights into project health for stakeholders, and driving value for investors, in just a short time, Procore has proven itself indispensable to Spartan, according to Saunders.

“Having Procore live for six months has made a world of difference, and we're only scratching the surface on the value that it can provide. We're all really excited about the future. We're excited about the tool.”