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✦ AI for groundworks and civils contractors
Groundworks businesses don't lose money on site. They lose it in the portacabin — on day sheets typed up twice, CIS paperwork chased on a Sunday, variations argued about three months later, and RAMS rewritten from scratch for a job you did last year.
Where the hours go
Not theory. These are the tasks that come up on every deep dive I do in this trade, and they are the same on a five-man gang as on a forty-man contract.
Written on site, photographed, then typed into a spreadsheet by someone in the office. The typing is the job a machine does. The writing on site is the job it never should.
Chasing UTRs, verifying subbies, matching invoices to day sheets, reconciling deductions. Repetitive, high-frequency, low-consequence if a draft is wrong. Textbook.
Rewritten from scratch each time because nobody can find last year's. First drafts from your own previous documents, in minutes, checked by the person who is actually accountable.
The estimating stays yours. The three hours of writing it up, formatting it and chasing it does not. Same quote, same shape, different numbers — which is exactly what this technology is for.
The email that proves the client asked for the extra 40 metres. Buried in an inbox. Findable in seconds if it is somewhere a machine can read.
Who has which ticket, which machine is due a service, which certificate expired last Tuesday. Nobody wants to own this spreadsheet. Nobody has to.
Groundworks is one of the least technical industries in the country, and that is precisely why the return is so high. The less software a business runs on, the more of its week is sitting in plain sight. What I say in the first hour, every time
How it works
The deep dive and the implementation day are on site. Too much of what matters is in the room — the whiteboard nobody rubs off, the woman in the office who quietly holds it all together, the process that exists only in a foreman's head.
We walk the office and the process end to end. Afterwards you get a written report: what to fix, in what order, and what each one is worth in hours.
A day with you and whoever runs the office. Low-cost AI tools implemented and running before I leave — starting with day sheets or CIS, usually.
One day a month for a year. Advanced integration, new tooling, and keeping you compliant as the rules move. Limited places. The first two fees are credited back.
Straight answers
It works better here than in a tech company. A software firm has already automated its admin. A groundworks contractor typically has forty hours a week of repetitive paperwork spread thinly across four people, which is why nobody has ever sat down and named it. The less technical the business, the faster the first win.
No, and if you intend it to, say so to her before I arrive rather than after. What changes is what she spends the day doing. In practice she stops typing up day sheets and starts chasing the variations nobody has time to chase — which is worth considerably more than her salary.
Before anything is typed we agree, in writing, which tools are used, on which paid plans, and what may never be pasted into them — subcontractor personal data included. Business tiers of the major tools do not train on your content by default. Nothing goes out unread by a named person. This is the first hour of the engagement, not an afterthought. It is not legal advice.
Thirty to fifty per cent of the repetitive office work, on the tasks worth touching. Not the estimating, not the site decisions, not the relationship with the main contractor. Anyone promising more than that has not stood in a portacabin in February.
On the implementation day, before I leave. The half-day deep dive produces a plan; the full day produces running tools.
CLR Groundworks, among others. I also run seven businesses of my own, including a compliance software company. I am not a consultant who has read about this.
Start here
The scorecard asks fifteen questions and tells you whether AI is worth your time this year. For roughly a third of businesses the honest answer is not yet — and it says so.
Fifteen questions, a score out of 100, and the three things I would fix first in your business.
Score my businessThe two-hour audit, the twelve jobs AI is good at, eight prompts to copy, and a ten-line AI policy.
Download the guideI walk your systems as they really work and send a written report and a prioritised plan.
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