Gavin George, co-founder and general manager of WorkflowMax, is a hardcore sports enthusiast who once played college rugby. Sports, he says, made him realize the power of collective work towards a common goal. It is this team spirit Gavin's company, WorkflowMax, is trying to imbue in business owners, through cloud-based software that empowers construction companies to manage their complex projects from start to finish in one fully integrated system from anywhere in the world.

In the construction industry, one of the biggest challenges facing companies is a lack of integrated solutions for managing projects. Lots of construction companies use one tool to track time, another to send invoices, another to manage projects, and something else for purchase orders. Very quickly this becomes a huge problem as none of them speak to each other and there is ongoing and increasing duplication of data. Furthermore, many companies still use paper systems and spreadsheets because they can’t find software that meets their needs. Gavin saw his older brothers, who operate a steel fabrication company, struggling with these issues, and decided to create a solution.

“The goal with WorkflowMax was to create a system where you enter the data once and it was carried through the whole process till the end of the project, completely eliminating double entry.” Gavin wanted to enable business owners to be able to free up time to focus on growing their business rather than managing it. “Each minute spent on managing projects internally is a cost to a business. Most business owners don’t realize that as they don’t have the systems in place to track it.”

Take the real-world example of a typical client—a construction firm based in Australia. This firm was struggling to manage all the admin and documentation around their projects–important emails were getting lost, people weren’t tracking their time accurately, and there was no easy way to see exactly what stage a job was at or how much of the budget had already been spent. Communicating with clients and collaborating during the documentation process was taking up a huge amount of time.