Conseco Group Grows with a Scalable Solution that Wins More Bids and Keeps Projects on Track
As Conseco Group, a Nashville-based commercial construction management firm, expanded their business and took on more complex projects, they needed a scalable solution to help streamline processes and manage unexpected changes and economic uncertainty. RedTeam Go was their answer, revolutionizing how Conseco manages project budgets, creates bids, handles change and ensures project continuity.
Conseco was the first user of RedTeam Go (formerly Paskr), implementing the solution in 2004 as a $200,000 company under the leadership of CEO Phil Pace. Conseco has since grown exponentially to a $20 million company, with RedTeam Go supporting that expansion. Pace is transparent about how his team relies on RedTeam Go for Conseco’s ongoing success.
The Challenge
As it was striving to grow, Conseco faced the same industry challenges as all commercial construction management companies: tight margins, intense competition and unforeseen macroeconomic events.
The company was also dealing with other familiar obstacles, including an inefficient budget management process prone to errors, causing financial loss. Disorganized bid tracking made it challenging to present comprehensive proposals and effectively demonstrate due diligence to developers. Overall, the bidding process caused frustration and anxiety.
With employee turnover, critical project information stored in personal emails, text messages, and hard copy files was often lost, and incoming project managers needed an exorbitant amount of time to “catch up,” causing delays. Ineffective management of unexpected project changes jeopardized profitability and compromised schedules.
“I can’t see managing a job without RedTeam Go anymore. I start a job with it and I end a job with it.”
SCOTT KARRLE | VP OF OPERATIONS
The Solution
Conseco selected RedTeam Go to address their challenges and enable their growth. A comprehensive construction project management solution, RedTeam Go, delivered what Conseco needed: a solution that improves their budget management process and allows them to develop competitive bids and keep projects on schedule even with sudden changes and turnover.
RedTeam Go’s cloud-based, integrated budget management process provides Conseco with a single solution for managing the project budget, while creating vendor contracts and changes, with all executed contracts and changes reflecting automatically on the budget. The budget worksheet ensures transparency and facilitates better decision-making. The process makes it easy to track bills and determine margins.
A centralized Bidding Module allows Conseco to track bids, compare quotes efficiently and present well-documented proposals to owners, leading to increased bid success rates.
The intuitive, user-friendly interface of RedTeam Go enables smooth transitions during employee turnover. The solution requires very little training, and new team members quickly get up to speed.
RedTeam Go’s out-of-the-box workflows provide much-needed agility. The submittal and RFI (Request for Information) processes expedite communication, making it faster and easier to share plan updates and manage changes. Conseco VP of Operations, Scott Karrle says, “In RedTeam Go, I load up all the plan updates and it asks me who I want to inform about them. I don’t have to email six different subs individually, so it’s a great time saver.” These intuitive, guided workflows greatly reduce any delays or disruptions caused by unforeseen plan updates and changes.
The Results
With the implementation of RedTeam Go, Conseco is better equipped to meet industry challenges, and has since achieved remarkable, sustained growth through significant improvements across its operations.
Greater confidence, accuracy and speed with budget management. Real-time budget updates put everyone on the same page, providing visibility into general conditions and weekly accruals. “I can tell you in real time my over under, accounts payable, etc. The numbers are always right in RedTeam Go,” says Pace. “Before RedTeam Go, we had built in our contract that we needed a week turnaround between receiving funds from the owner and giving it to the subcontractor. We don’t need a week anymore, we need less than an hour.” Project profitability has increased by 2%, because project managers at Conseco have an increased sense of ownership and accountability over the project budget, and a culture of problem-solving has taken root.
Conseco is winning more bids. RedTeam Go’s bidding process has helped Conseco achieve a 50% bid success rate, because they can showcase to owners their due diligence and effectively demonstrate the differentiating value of their proposals. “If I can get in front of a client and show them our bidding page in RedTeam Go and why we’re second lowest, my success rate is almost 50%, Pace says. “We can prove we’re doing our due diligence, and that’s a really strong negotiating tool.”
Projects stay on track, even through turnover. The centralized documentation and intuitive interface of RedTeam Go allows new project managers to pick up ongoing projects without delays, increasing project efficiency and profitability. For example, when a project manager left Conseco’s largest project mid-way, within just one hour another project manager was able to step in and move forward without interruption.
Increased agility has decreased anxiety. RedTeam Go enables Conseco to adapt swiftly to unanticipated changes and to inform all team members of those changes immediately. During construction of a surgery center with several plan updates during construction, Conseco relied on the agility of RedTeam Go to track and share all plan revisions and updates in real time. Questions were resolved quickly and everything was organized while moving at a fast pace. The team wasn’t thrown off balance or delayed. “The real advantage of RedTeam Go is that it reduces anxiety,” says Pace, especially when managing multiple project changes. Not only did the submittal and RFI process in RedTeam Go enable fast communication with architects and subcontractors, but time management and tracking of change orders were handled quickly without disrupting work.
RedTeam Go further proved its worth during the pandemic when Conseco used the solution’s processes and guided workflows to keep a multi-million dollar set of projects for a fast food client on track. Conseco made up for months of delays caused by the pandemic and met the deadline, completing $80M in projects in one quarter (versus the typical $8 million) in spite of scheduling challenges, a smaller staff and an economic downturn. “Without RedTeam Go, we couldn’t have successfully completed that volume of projects the way we did it,” says Pace. “It would have been too much to handle.”
Karrle, who’s been at Conseco Group for 15 years serving as superintendent and project manager, agrees that RedTeam Go has become indispensable. “I can’t see managing a job without RedTeam Go anymore,” he says. “I start a job with it and I end a job with it.”
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