Case Study
The Construct Group
From spreadsheets to a unified platform. In two months.
The Challenge
The Construct Group is a retail fixture installation company. National footprint. 50+ workers in the field at any given time. Projects spanning every major retail chain you've walked into.
When we met them, they were stuck at levels 2 through 4 on the progression. Spreadsheets for labor forecasting. Manual purchase order processing. Inventory tracked by memory and phone calls. Scheduling that lived in someone's head. A dozen disconnected tools that didn't talk to each other.
The operations worked. They'd been working for years. But the manual overhead was enormous. Every project manager spent hours on administrative tasks that should have taken minutes. Information moved through the company at the speed of email. Decisions were made with incomplete data because pulling complete data took too long.
What We Built
A unified operations platform. 182,442 lines of production code. 93 database tables. 12 integrated modules. Over 100 pages of interface. Built in approximately two months by one person.
The Modules
Project Management
Labor Forecasting
Purchase Orders
Inventory Management
Scheduling & Dispatch
Financial Tracking
Vendor Management
Reporting & Analytics
Worker Management
Client Portal
Document Management
AI Operations Agent
What Changed
Before the platform, TCG's project managers spent a significant part of their day on administrative work — manually compiling labor forecasts, processing purchase orders by hand, tracking inventory through phone calls and spreadsheets, and assembling reports from disconnected systems. Information moved through the company at the speed of email, and decisions were made with whatever data someone could pull together in the moment.
After deployment, those workflows moved into a single integrated system. Labor forecasting that used to require manual data compilation runs automatically. Purchase orders that involved multiple steps of manual entry and approval routing now flow through the system in minutes. Inventory is tracked in real time instead of reconciled after the fact. Financial data, project status, and operational metrics are all available in one place without anyone having to assemble them.
The AI agent team handles daily executive operations — morning intelligence briefs, email triage, meeting preparation, and operational monitoring. TCG's leadership gets a synthesized view of the business every morning before their day starts, built from actual system data rather than someone's summary.
The result was significant enough that TCG came on as an equity partner. Ben Barnes, TCG's CEO, now actively refers other operators to 1404.
The Compounding Effect
Month 1
Core platform live. Team onboarding. Immediate wins in PO processing and labor forecasting. The system is learning the company's patterns.
Month 12
AI agents know every workflow. Automated monitoring catches problems before they surface. The system has observed thousands of decisions and understands the business at a level no single employee does.
Month 24
Institutional knowledge is embedded in the technology. The system doesn't just support operations. It drives them. The competitive advantage is permanent. A new competitor starting from zero cannot close this gap.
Let's talk about what your operations could look like
A 30-minute call to walk through what this could look like for your business.
Book a Call