Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Construction and Contractor Founders

Sales & CRMFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running bids out of Excel, tracking clients in your phone contacts, and following up on proposals whenever you remember to — which means some of them never get a second call. Your GC or specialty trade business has real prospects: architects who send repeat work, developers with three projects queued, property managers who need a trusted sub for every job. But you're also the person on the roof at 2pm, so the bid you sent two weeks ago to the property management company in the next county never got a follow-up. A $38,000 remodel fell through not because they went with someone else — they just didn't hear back. You don't need HubSpot. You need something that tracks who you've talked to, which bids are pending, and reminds you to call the developer you met at the permit office.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM built around how construction sales actually works — bid stages, job type, project address, bid amount, and follow-up date — not a generic 'pipeline' designed for SaaS reps

Automated follow-up reminders so no pending bid goes more than a week without a touchpoint, even when you're on-site all day

A single place to see every active bid, dead lead, and repeat-client relationship, with email thread history pulled in so you know exactly what was said last

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM

Data sources & config

CRM connects to Gmail via scheduled sync — Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and pulls email thread history directly into contact records so you can see the last message exchanged with any client. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no API needed — to keep contact profiles current. Email Triage also pulls from your synced Gmail data. If you use Buildertrend, CoConstruct, or another field management tool, Starch automates it through your browser to pull job status and project details into your CRM records.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for a small general contracting business. I need to track contacts — property owners, developers, architects, property managers — with fields for: company name, contact type, project address, bid amount, bid date, follow-up date, job type (remodel, new build, commercial fit-out), and current stage (prospect, bid sent, bid won, bid lost, on hold). Add a notes field for what we talked about. I want to be able to ask 'which bids have been out more than 10 days with no follow-up?' and get a real list.

Set up email triage for my Gmail. Flag any email from a client, architect, developer, or property manager. Summarize threads longer than 5 messages in one sentence. Draft a follow-up reply for any bid-related email I haven't responded to in 48 hours. Remind me every Friday at 4pm about any unanswered messages from the past week.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Install the CRM starter app from the Starch App Store — it gives you a working contact and deal tracker out of the box, but you're going to customize it for construction in the next step.

2 Tell Starch your actual pipeline: 'My stages are: lead, bid prep, bid sent, bid won, bid lost, on hold. Add fields for job type, project address, bid amount, and follow-up date.' Starch rebuilds the schema to match how you actually work.

3 Connect Gmail — Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and threads every email exchange automatically into the matching contact record, so you can see the full conversation history without copying anything.

4 Import your existing contacts from wherever they live — paste in a CSV from your phone export, upload your Excel bid tracker, or just tell Starch the names and let it start fresh. Starch will map the fields and flag duplicates.

5 For any leads that came through Buildertrend, CoConstruct, or your field management software, tell Starch to pull job and client data through browser automation — no API required. This gets your active project clients into the CRM without manual entry.

6 Install Email Triage (listed as Founder Inbox in the App Store) and connect it to the same Gmail account. Tell it to flag and summarize anything from architects, developers, property managers, and subs — and to draft follow-up replies for bid-related threads you haven't touched in 48 hours.

7 Set a follow-up automation: 'Every Friday at 8am, show me every bid in the CRM that's been in Bid Sent stage for more than 7 days with no logged activity. Draft a short follow-up email for each one and put it in my drafts folder.' Starch builds this as a scheduled automation.

8 Add LinkedIn enrichment — Starch automates LinkedIn through your browser to pull updated job titles, company info, and connection context for your developer and architect contacts, keeping records accurate without you doing research.

9 Set up a weekly summary: 'Every Monday morning, send me a Slack message listing all open bids, their amounts, days since sent, and whether I've followed up.' This replaces the mental load of remembering what's pending.

10 Log your first real deals by walking Starch through a few current bids verbally: 'Add a deal: Riverside Remodel, contact is Tom Haines at Haines Properties, bid amount $54,000, sent March 3, follow up due March 17, job type residential remodel.' Starch creates the record.

11 Ask Starch a real question to test the CRM: 'Which contacts haven't I spoken to in 30 days?' or 'Show me all bids over $20,000 that are still in Bid Sent.' If the answer isn't useful, refine the schema — tell Starch what's missing.

12 Once the CRM is running for two weeks, ask for a win-rate report: 'Of all bids I sent in the last 90 days, how many did I win vs. lose, and what was the average bid amount for each?' Use this to decide which job types and client types to prioritize.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Bid Pipeline Cleanup — March

Sample numbers from a real run

Open bids (Bid Sent stage)	187,000
Bids over 10 days old with no follow-up	94,000
Bids won YTD	142,000
Bids lost or no-response YTD	61,000
Average days to close (won bids)	18

In early March, you run the question 'Which bids have been out more than 10 days with no follow-up?' and get a list of five jobs totaling $94,000. The biggest is a $38,000 bathroom gut-and-rebuild for a property management company you met at a permit office in January. The last email in the thread was your bid PDF, sent February 18 — no reply, no follow-up. Email Triage had flagged their reply asking for a revised scope two weeks ago, but it got buried. Starch surfaces it, drafts a follow-up that acknowledges the delay and references the scope question, and drops it in your Gmail drafts. You send it in 30 seconds. Three days later they confirm. The other four bids get similar treatment over the course of one Friday afternoon. You close two more. The CRM now shows a running win rate of 58% on residential remodels vs. 31% on commercial fit-outs — which tells you where to spend your estimating time in Q2.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Bid follow-up rate: percentage of sent bids that received at least one follow-up contact within 10 days

Bid win rate by job type: win rate for residential remodel, new build, and commercial fit-out tracked separately

Average days from bid sent to decision (won or lost)

Open bid value: total dollar value of bids currently in Bid Sent stage

Repeat client rate: percentage of won jobs from contacts who have hired you before

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Excel or Google Sheets bid tracker

Free and familiar, but it doesn't pull in email history, doesn't remind you to follow up, and can't answer natural-language questions about your pipeline — you have to remember to update it manually after every call.

HubSpot (free tier)

More features than you need, schema built for SaaS sales reps, and the free tier pushes you toward paid plans once you want automation — plus someone has to configure and maintain it, which is usually nobody.

Buildertrend or CoConstruct CRM module

Built for project management first; the CRM is an afterthought, lacks email thread history, and doesn't do follow-up reminders or pipeline analytics without a lot of manual entry.

Jobber (client management)

Good for scheduling and invoicing residential service work, but the lead tracking is shallow and it won't connect your bid pipeline to your email inbox or give you win-rate reporting.

Contacts app + phone reminders

Zero cost and always with you, but it scales to about 15 active relationships before something falls through the cracks — and it has no memory of what you quoted or when.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, founder inbox all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I use Buildertrend for project management. Can Starch pull my client and job data from there into the CRM?

Yes. Buildertrend doesn't have a public API that Starch syncs directly, but Starch automates Buildertrend through your browser — no API needed. You describe what data you want pulled (client names, project addresses, job status, contract amounts) and Starch navigates the site and extracts it on a schedule. It's not instantaneous like a direct integration, but it works and it beats manual copy-paste.

What if my leads are all over the place — some in my phone, some in Gmail, some in a spreadsheet from two years ago?

That's the normal starting point. Export your phone contacts to a CSV, download your spreadsheet, and tell Starch to import and deduplicate them. For Gmail, Starch syncs your email data on a schedule and can surface contacts you've exchanged messages with even if they were never in a formal CRM. You describe the fields you care about and Starch maps what it finds. You'll still need to review the imports, but the heavy lifting is handled.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I have clients who ask about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If a client or GC requires a SOC 2 report from every vendor you use, that's worth knowing upfront. For most small construction businesses tracking bids and client contacts, this isn't a blocker — but it's an honest answer.

Will this replace Procore for project management?

No, and it's not trying to. Starch is for the sales and relationship side — tracking bids, following up on leads, managing client contacts, and understanding which jobs you're winning. Procore handles RFIs, submittals, scheduling, and field management. If you're running Procore (or want to), Starch can automate it through your browser to pull job data into your CRM, but it's not a replacement.

How long does it take to set up the CRM?

Most founders get a working CRM in one session — roughly 30 to 60 minutes to describe your pipeline, connect Gmail, and import existing contacts. The follow-up automation and weekly summary take another 15 minutes to configure. You're not building from scratch; you're describing what you need in plain English and Starch assembles it. The CRM starter app in the App Store gives you a working starting point so you're not configuring from a blank slate.

I don't have time to keep a CRM updated. What happens when I forget to log a call?

Gmail sync handles most of the logging automatically — if you emailed someone, that thread shows up in their contact record without you doing anything. For calls and site visits you'll still need to add a note, but Starch can prompt you: set up an automation that asks you every evening to log any calls you made that day and adds them to the right record. It's not zero work, but it's closer to it than any CRM you've tried before.