Respect through results: Breaking through male-dominated construction with no-code tech

Sometimes finding the right path requires drastic action. Sometimes, those actions might seem crazy to others. My advice, based on my last few years? Stay the course. You never know what might happen.

Some context. Not long ago, I was the VP of Operations, COO, and CIO at a NASDAQ-100 company. This was the culmination of years of climbing the corporate ladder, soaking in everything there is to know about strategic and operational leadership.

It was a job I'd have killed for when I was first starting out, and I really did love it. But something was missing. I found myself looking for a new challenge and, to the surprise of some of my peers, I found it in construction.

Maybe it had something to do with my first husband, as he worked in construction, and I loved looking at the blueprints. Maybe it was an intuitive sense I had that, at heart, software development and construction were entwined processes, both bound up in a clear sense of an end-product.

I started by dipping my toes in the water, doing some business process consulting for R&R Industries, one of the largest construction companies in Central Florida. Pretty quickly, I was sucked in. When I told my boss I was leaving to join R&R full-time as COO, he looked at me like I was crazy. At that moment, I thought, maybe I was.

Certainly, those first few days on the job didn't help. I arrived at a workplace, and it was in complete chaos: 51 active jobs, no project schedule, no project management software.

My mind was instantly aflame with plans on how to bring the company into the digital age. They were at risk of being completely pen and pencil. Fire, hurricane, and theft - any of those acts could put them out of business. But I could sense resistance from the start - who was this woman from New York to tell us how to do our job?

Bringing no-code tech to construction

When I started at the construction firm, crews were still writing notes on paper bags. Timesheets were scrawled on cardboard boxes. Documents were in disarray, stored via Salesforce to little purpose - essentially, they were using it as a kind of ultra-expensive Google Drive.

Worse yet, resources were grievously misallocated. Profit insight was minimal: months would pass before we knew whether we'd lost money on a given job. Too often, we were in the dark on such basic matters as job overruns, inventory, etc. 

When it comes to construction or any industry, you have to be a type of visionary and be able to see what that product can ultimately be – while at the same time, watching their struggles. 

So I did what I do best: dug into processes and identified what to fix. This isn't something you can do from behind a laptop: I got out there and spent real time with my colleagues, not just in other departments but on the ground with the crews. I asked them, what are your bottlenecks? How are you logging tasks? Why, in your opinion, are things so tangled up?

At the heart of the matter was a basic disconnect: an inability to properly forecast revenue.

There'd been hesitancy, before I arrived at the company, about really going all-in on a centralized company platform. I was lucky in this respect: I had real support from the CEO, Guy Beasley, who let the team know that he was fully on my side - essentially, "if you're not on team Angie, you're not on the team." Soon enough, they were calling me Boss Lady.

All of this support helped tremendously when I'd finally devised my solution to the company's problems: Ragic, a no-code database builder.

No-code technology was, in my opinion, crucial, as construction is traditionally not a tech-forward space - in this industry, people can be wary of supposedly "centralized" solutions that may prove too complicated to use.

That wasn't the case here. Very quickly, we set up an efficient system for CRM, job costing, scheduling, fleet management, revenue forecasting, you name it. The staff loved it, and most importantly, it produced actual results: namely, a 28% profitability increase for the company.

The birth of R&R Automation

Looking back, this was a real turning point. I started to think: if I could do this for my company, why not try to do it for others? Clearly, the construction space could use a large dose of tech expertise.

And so, by 2021, after a few years of a successful partnership with Ragic, we broadened outwards: Dave Howard and R&R Industries owners Guy Beasley and Johan Pretorious, forming R&R Automation.

Essentially, we began doing for other construction companies what I'd managed to accomplish at ours. We took the system I built and turned it into a replicable template, which we could then sell to other construction companies still stymied by disorganized, largely paper-based processes.

Very quickly, these companies were able to prevent over-budgeting before it could become a problem. They were able to forecast revenue six months out, radically streamlining planning. And they were able to synchronize departments, so that sales, production, finance, and fleet management were all working as one.

I'll admit that a part of me was nervous when I left the corporate world for construction. It would almost make for a good, old-fashioned fish-out-of-water comedy: a woman from the big city storms into a Florida construction site and starts trying to tell experienced construction workers what to do. What I learned, in the end, is that the world I came from and the world I entered weren't so different after all: in both, what mattered first and foremost were results. Those, I knew, I could deliver.

The fact is, I always wanted to be the conductor, the leader. I can remember so vividly being four years old and my dad was retired military. We were in the NCO club for Halloween. We're all dressed up and my uncle was playing a fiddle and we're all supposed to parade around in circles by age group. What did I do? I stepped out of my circle and I directed the circle.

When you are a process engineer or a software developer, you have to have vision. You have to be able to see the end product in order to guide everyone there and that has been a role I have been playing ever since.