Big Red Construction is a UK-based multi-sector contractor founded in 2018. What started as a small bar fit-out business has grown into a company of 35 core staff and 15 contractors, operating across multiple sectors with a turnover that has risen from £1.5m to £20m. Technology has been central to that growth from the start – the company actively seeks out tools that help its teams work more safely and more efficiently on site.
Construction runs on paperwork, and Big Red was no different. With over 150 site management forms, the team was relying on spreadsheets and disconnected documents that made it hard to collaborate or make sense of data. Setting up a new project took around four hours. Safety observations from sites were coming in at fewer than ten per year – the process for reporting them was simply too cumbersome for busy site teams to use consistently. There was no real-time visibility across the portfolio, and pulling together reports for management meetings meant hours of manual work every time.
Big Red introduced Smartsheet to manage projects and schedules, and over time built out a series of solutions – starting with a sales pipeline that gave management a live, consolidated view of the business for the first time. A QR-code-based safety observation system followed, allowing workers to submit reports from site instantly and anonymously. A centralised RFI process replaced back-and-forth email chains between project leaders and designers. With support from Prodactive, the team then standardised their entire project setup using Control Center and WorkApps, creating a repeatable blueprint for every new project and giving each client access to live dashboards without needing a Smartsheet account.
Safety observations rose from fewer than 10 per year to 230 submissions. Project setup time fell from four hours to 30 minutes, with around 30 documents – schedules, RFIs, risk analyses – generated automatically at the point of creation. Board reporting that previously took hours is now pulled from a live dashboard. Clients regularly comment on the quality of Big Red’s reporting and project visibility. Since implementing Smartsheet, the company has grown from £1.5m to £20m in turnover, with £30m forecast for the coming year.
We implemented these automated processes in a very short time, and I absolutely couldn’t have gotten there myself. So here’s my advice to those who want to bring something exciting to their business, but don’t have a lot of time: look outside and you might find the help you need.
