If you build roads, site work, bridge or other critical infrastructure - chances are your Customer Relationship Management or “CRM” is a spreadsheet, a stack of printed summaries of quantity sheets, and a few folks on the team who just know what’s being tracked.

It works - until it doesn’t.

Maybe we miss a bid because someone forgot to register. We get too aggressive and leave a bunch of money on the table in the same area three jobs in a row. A GC doesn’t reach out to us on a critical site package for a new data center because we’ve lost touch. Or maybe one estimator is completely overloaded. 

I once submitted a $6.5M bid 19 seconds late that would have been the low bid. Another time, I underpriced a $2.1M job by $700K.

Those moments showed me that estimating wasn’t the problem. Our system was.

🔮 The Estimating Software Myth

Estimating platforms like HCSS or B2W are great at what they do: building bid files and crunching numbers.

But they were never designed to:

• Track who’s bidding what

• Manage pursuit workload

• Coordinate BD and estimators

• Analyze win/loss outcomes

• Understand the competition

• Forecast backlog or market trends

If they were, we wouldn’t be using Excel to manage our bid logs.

Why Civil Construction Needs Its Own CRM

Tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Monday work well in many industries. But in horizontal construction? They’re a square peg in a round hole. You can throw consultants and implementors at them, but they’ll never truly reflect how your team works.

Cosential (Unanet) and Project Mark are steps in the right direction - they’ve shown how construction-specific CRMs can work well for building-focused and specialty contractors. But they are not made for low-bid, high-volume, self-perform civil work.

Horizontal work is different.

• Outside of negotiated jobs, low bid wins
  

• Scope is buried in PDFs
  

• Timelines are compressed
  

• Estimators are overloaded
  

• Bids go out every day - not every quarter
  

What you need isn’t just a CRM. You need a preconstruction command center.

🔹 The Problem with the Current Stack

🔍 What a Great Civil CRM Should Actually Do

🤖 Why We Built Edgevanta

We didn’t start with "CRM" in mind. We started in the bid room. 

The real world kind - whiteboards, plans on the wall, pressure, sub quotes and cuts flying in an hour before the bid, and heavy competition.

Edgevanta is preconstruction software built for infrastructure contractors.

• Track your entire pipeline
  

• Assign and manage estimators
  

• Flag risks early with AI
  

• Integrate with your email, estimating tools, and ERP
  

• Learn from past bids so you can price smarter and expand margin capture (2% margin expansion on $150M top line revenue is $3,000,000 annual extra profit)

We’re not here to replace estimating software. We’re here make the whole process better.

✨ The Future is Smart Precon

The best firms are already modernizing. They’re doing for preconstruction what a company like Tenna is doing for fleet management: connecting the dots.

If you're still managing a $100M+ business from spreadsheets and group texts… ground is being lost.

We are here to help fix that.

Best,

Tristan

In Case You Missed It:

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About the Author

Tristan Wilson is the CEO and Founder of Edgevanta. We make software that helps contractors win more work at the right price. He is a 4th Generation Contractor, construction enthusiast, ultra runner, and bidding nerd. He worked his way up the ladder at Allan Myers in the Mid-Atlantic and his family’s former business Barriere Construction before starting Edgevanta in Nashville, where the company is based. Reach out to him at [email protected]