AVIDITY INNOVATIONS
Commercial Exteriors
How a commercial cladding contractor reclaimed 20+ hours a week and doubled their bids they sent out - without hiring a single person
About
Company: Preferred Exteriors
Location: Texas
Revenue at Start: $22M
Services: Strategy, Implementation, and Maintenance
68%
reduction in bid time per project
22 hrs
saved per week across estimating & operations
3 wks
to full implementation for Revenue Growth zone
"I knew we needed to fix it. I just didn't know anyone who actually understood our business well enough to help. Others wanted to sell us more software. Avidity sat down with us and learned how we actually work."
- Fernando M., Owner of Preferred Exteriors
THE SITUATION BEFORE AVIDITY
We were doing good volume — $14 million last year — but every bid felt like we were starting from scratch. My estimator and I were building the same spreadsheets over and over, pulling labor rates manually, chasing scope documents buried in email threads. We had no real system. Just a lot of personal knowledge and late nights. We have a great reputation and the GCs love us but we had more RFPs than we could bid on. I thought we needed to hire 1-2 more estimators to grow.
The WIP was worse. We had a spreadsheet that technically tracked everything, but it was only updated twice a year. It would take weeks of meeting with Project Mgrs to update. You'd go to a Monday morning meeting and find out the numbers were two weeks old.
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Document Intake Workflow
Scope documents, RFIs, and addenda now route automatically into the right job folder and flag the estimator. Nothing gets lost in someone's inbox.
Bidding Automation
A templated bid system that pulls labor rates, material pricing, and scope variables automatically. An estimator now builds a bid in 40 minutes that used to take three hours.
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WHAT WE BUILT
Avidity started with a discovery assessment — two days with our team understanding the real workflow, not the ideal one. They mapped exactly where time was being lost. By the end of that week, we had a clear plan and I finally understood what was possible.
Owner Reporting
Every Monday morning I get a one-page summary of where every job stands. I used to spend two hours pulling that together myself. Now I read it with my coffee.
3 Weeks Later
Three weeks after we started, the system was live. Not a pilot — the whole thing. My estimator stopped working weekends. Our WIP meeting went from an hour of arguing about numbers to a 20-minute decision-making call. And we bid 30% more work in the following quarter because we finally had the capacity to.
The Result
"I've worked with consultants who handed me a report and disappeared. Avidity stays in it with us and makes sure everything is running right. They continue doing the work instead of sitting on the sidelines."
— Fernando M., Owner, Preferred Exteriors