A CRM for framing contractors, built around bids

Nearly everything sold as a contractor CRM assumes you are trying to win more customers. A framing shop generally is not. It has six or eight builder relationships, it would like them to stay, and its real problem is that those relationships do not coordinate with each other.

Three builders want crews in the second week of March. Nobody wants anything in the fourth. That is the framing business in one sentence, and it is a scheduling problem wearing a sales problem’s clothes.

What the record actually needs to hold

Five things per bid: which builder, which job, how many framers, roughly when it would start, and where it stands.

That is enough to answer the only question that matters, which is what the next eight weeks look like if the outstanding bids land. A shop that can see on the first of the month that the last fortnight is thin has four weeks to do something about it — call a builder, chase a bid that went quiet, take the smaller job it would otherwise have declined.

A shop that discovers the gap on the Monday it starts has a week of paid framers and nothing to frame.

Note what is not on that list. No deal stages, no probability weighting, no forecast. Those exist for businesses selling to strangers, and adding them to a framing shop produces a system that is tedious to keep current and therefore is not kept current.

The bid that goes quiet

Builders do not usually decline a framing bid. They go quiet, because the project they were bidding has not been awarded, or the client is deciding, or the schedule moved.

That silence is information and most shops treat it as an ending. A bid submitted in February with no answer by April is worth a short call, and the call is welcome roughly as often as it is not — builders are frequently sitting on a project that stalled and had simply not thought to tell the framer.

You cannot make those calls without a list of what is outstanding and when it was sent. This is the smallest possible useful thing, and it is most of the value.

Plans, revisions and the version that framed the wrong wall

The second failure this record should prevent is documentary. A builder sends plans. The builder sends revised plans a fortnight later. The revision reaches whoever’s phone happened to be nearest, and the crew frames to the set they were given.

That error is expensive and entirely unrecoverable after the fact. It is also almost always a transmission problem rather than a competence one.

The remedy is unglamorous: one place per job where the current set lives, with a date on it, where anyone can confirm what is current in ten seconds. It does not need approval workflows or version control in any sophisticated sense. It needs to exist and to be the only place anyone looks, which is a habit more than a technology.

Capacity is the output

If the record does one thing well, it should be able to answer: how many framers am I committed to in each of the next eight weeks.

That single view changes how a shop bids. It makes it obvious when to push a start date rather than decline, when a smaller job is worth taking, and when to say no early rather than late. Saying no early preserves a builder relationship; saying no in week one damages it.

What it should not become

The strongest recommendation here is restraint. Framing shops are sold elaborate systems and abandon them, and the abandonment is rational — the system was built for a business with a different shape.

Keep it to the bid list and the plan location. Add nothing until a specific week goes wrong in a specific way. The framing hub covers why this trade’s constraints are so different from a homeowner-facing one, and the general contracting page covers what the two do share.

Where the enquiry came from

One field that repays keeping: how the bid reached you.

Framing work arrives through a small number of channels — a builder you already work with, a referral from another sub, a general contractor who found you. Over a year that record tells you which relationships are actually producing work and which are producing conversation. Shops are frequently surprised, and the surprise usually redirects where the owner spends their time.

This is a modest piece of information that costs one field and is impossible to reconstruct afterwards.

Reviewing it weekly, and what that means

The record only works if someone looks at it, and the useful cadence is weekly rather than monthly.

It takes ten minutes: what is outstanding, what has gone quiet for more than a fortnight, and what the next eight weeks of committed crew looks like. Those three questions produce the calls worth making that week.

A monthly review is too slow, because a gap spotted four weeks out is fixable and a gap spotted one week out is not. The landscaping page makes the same argument about a weekly review of unbilled work, and the reasoning is identical: short intervals turn a record into a habit.

What this is not

It is not a forecast, and it should not be asked to become one. The framing hub is direct about why sales-pipeline software fits this trade badly, and the temptation to add stages and probabilities is the most reliable way to end up with a system nobody updates.

The demos include a working record you can put sample bids through, and starting a project begins with a description of the week that keeps going wrong.