Running a General Contracting business has always been about managing variables—weather, labor, materials. But as the industry evolves, new variables are emerging that directly impact the bottom line.
We looked at five key statistics from recent industry reports to understand how administrative friction and data management are affecting margins for GCs in the $1M to $15M revenue range.
One of the most significant operational drags identified in recent years is the time spent simply locating information. According to a report by FMI and Autodesk, construction professionals spend roughly 11.5 hours per week looking for project data.
For a mid-sized contractor, this represents more than a full day of productivity per employee, per week. It suggests that while we have more digital documents than ever—PDFs, change orders, updated drawings—the systems to organize them haven’t kept pace. The challenge isn’t just having the information; it’s being able to retrieve it instantly when a sub calls with a question. Source
The operational fragmentation in the industry is high. A study by JBKnowledge indicates that the average construction firm uses roughly 11 different applications to manage a project.
This often looks like a combination of Dropbox for files, Excel for budgets, email for bid management, and texts for field updates. For the business owner, this fragmentation creates “data silos.” When information doesn’t flow automatically between the budget and the bid, it requires manual reconciliation, which increases the likelihood of version control errors. Source
Pre-construction is the most critical phase for profit protection, yet it is often the most labor-intensive. Industry analysis suggests that estimators spend between 60% and 80% of their time just qualifying bids and entering data.
This indicates a mismatch in talent utilization. Estimators are typically high-value employees paid for their strategic pricing and scoping abilities. When the majority of their week is spent reading PDF proposals and manually typing line items into spreadsheets, the firm loses that strategic capacity. Source
Bid coverage is a primary driver of cost competitiveness. However, data from CoConstruct highlights that projects under $250k average only 3.5 bids per trade.
From a risk management perspective, a sample size of three is precarious. If one bid is high and one is unresponsive, the GC loses negotiating leverage. This statistic highlights the difficulty of scaling outreach; manually calling and emailing subcontractors to ensure coverage is time-consuming, often leading to a “take what we can get” approach to buyout. Source
The Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) benchmarks the average GC net profit margin at roughly 5–6%. However, their data shows that “Best-in-Class” contractors—defined by top-quartile performance and technology adoption—consistently achieve 10–12% net margins.
This performance gap suggests that efficiency is not just a convenience, but a competitive moat. The firms hitting double-digit margins are likely those that have reduced the administrative friction mentioned above—streamlining the parsing of proposals and organization of files—allowing them to handle more volume with the same overhead. Source
Does technology actually increase profit margins? According to the CFMA data referenced above, yes. While software has a cost, the “Best-in-Class” contractors who adopt it see margins of 10-12%, compared to the industry average of 5-6%. The ROI comes from reducing the “Admin Tax”—the hours paid for non-billable work like searching for files.
How can small GCs fix the “data silo” problem? The most effective method is centralization. Instead of using disparate systems (Dropbox for files, Email for bids, Excel for budgets), moving to a platform that handles Cloud File Storage, Bid Management, and Budgeting in one place ensures that when a file is updated, everyone sees it instantly.
The data is clear: manual processes are the bottleneck keeping many GCs from scaling.
Bid Bench was built to directly address these administrative inefficiencies.