Why construction firms outgrow off-the-shelf tools
Growing pains, not growth
Sharmans manufactures and distributes Plygene, a gutter lining product sold to contractors working on commercial properties. As the business grew, so did the number of projects, properties and contacts it had to track, and the systems it was running to track them stopped keeping up.
The problem wasn’t any single piece of software failing. It was several disconnected systems, none of them talking to each other, each one adding friction rather than removing it. Reporting was frustrating. Communication between teams and with contractors was harder than it needed to be. The business was growing, but the systems underneath it were dragging on that growth rather than supporting it.
Shoothill built Sharmans a single custom platform: a project overview with filtering across every property, occupier, contractor and specifier, financial tracking wired directly into Sage, task automation tied to their calendar, and Power BI dashboards replacing manual reporting. One hub, role-based access, and the company now runs its operations through it.
Managing Director Mark De Rozarieux put it plainly:
“Highly engaged and expert in what they do, Shoothill have transformed our business.”
The pattern: reporting is usually where it shows first
Sharmans’ story is one version of a pattern we see across construction, modular building and manufacturing businesses at a similar stage: reporting and accounting are usually the first place growth outpaces the tools. Manual processes that worked fine at a smaller scale start eating a disproportionate amount of time as the business grows, because the effort scales with the number of projects, not the size of the team doing the reporting.
We’ve seen that show up in concrete terms elsewhere. For one construction client, automating a manual accounting and reporting process that used to take an entire department the best part of a day cut it down to the click of a button, a genuine step change, not a marginal improvement.
That’s the tell. If reporting, invoicing or cross-team communication is taking noticeably longer as the business grows rather than staying flat, that’s not a training problem or a discipline problem. It’s a sign the tooling was built for a smaller or differently-shaped version of the business than the one you’re now running.
Signs you’ve outgrown your current setup
- Multiple disconnected systems covering different parts of the same process (sales, projects, accounts, reporting) that don’t share data with each other.
- Reporting that takes disproportionately longer than it used to, because it’s still manual and the business has grown around it.
- Workarounds and spreadsheets patched in to cover gaps between the systems you already pay for.
- Growth being constrained by the software, rather than the software flexing to support it.
We cover the broader build-vs-buy question in our piece on [custom software for construction and housebuilding], and the same pattern in a professional-services context in our [Base case study]. Sharmans is the manufacturing and distribution version of the same story: the fix wasn’t a better off-the-shelf tool, it was one system built around how the business actually runs.
Talk to us about your systems
If reporting, communication or project tracking are getting harder as you grow rather than easier, that’s usually a sign it’s time to talk to us. We’ve spent over 20 years building the systems that replace the disconnected ones.