The Cheetah

A cheetah doesn't win because it's the biggest animal on the savanna. Lions are bigger. Elephants are bigger. Hippos will ruin your day. The cheetah wins because it's the fastest. And once it starts running, nothing catches it.

That's what technology does to a company. It doesn't make you bigger. It makes you faster. And speed, unlike size, compounds.

The compounding problem

Most people think about technology as a one-time improvement. You buy the software, you get a boost, you're done. Like buying a new truck — it's better than the old truck, but a truck is a truck.

That's not how it works. Technology improvements compound. Each improvement makes the next one possible. Each system you build creates data that makes the next system smarter. Each process you automate frees up time that lets you automate the next process. It's not addition. It's multiplication.

This is the part that's hard to see when you're standing still. A 5% improvement doesn't look like much. But 5% compounded over five years is 28%. And in construction, where margins are thin and competition is fierce, 28% is the difference between thriving and surviving.

Two companies, same starting line

Let me run the numbers because numbers don't lie and they don't have opinions.

Company A and Company B. Both at $20 million revenue. Both running at 12% net margins. Both good companies, both good operators. Same market, same clients, same starting position.

Company A decides to invest in technology. Not a massive bet — a deliberate, sustained investment in building real infrastructure for their business.

Year 1: Company A invests in better estimating systems, integrated project data, and automated reporting. The improvements show up slowly at first, then faster as the team adapts. Margins improve by 3 points. On $20 million, that's $600,000 in additional profit. From 12% to 15%, $2.4 million to $3 million.

Year 2: Building on that foundation, Company A adds AI-powered document processing, predictive scheduling, and automated compliance tracking. The data from Year 1 makes these systems smarter out of the gate. Another 2 points of margin improvement. Now they're at 17%, pulling $3.4 million on the same revenue.

Year 3: The flywheel is spinning. Company A's systems are catching change order opportunities their competitors miss. Their estimates are tighter because they have two years of integrated data telling them exactly where jobs go sideways. Their overhead is lower because half the administrative work is automated. Another 2 points. 19% margins. $3.8 million.

Company B? Still at 12%. Still running the same way. Still making $2.4 million. Nothing went wrong for Company B. They didn't make any mistakes. They just stood still.

Now watch what happens

Here's where it gets ugly for Company B.

Company A is making $3.8 million versus Company B's $2.4 million. That's $1.4 million more per year. But it's not just about the money — it's about what that money enables.

Company A can now underbid Company B on every single contract and still make more profit. Read that again. They can charge less and earn more. That's what 7 points of margin difference does. It's not a competitive advantage — it's a competitive moat.

With higher margins, Company A pays better wages. Better wages attract better crews. Better crews do better work with less rework. Less rework improves margins further. The cycle feeds itself.

With higher margins, Company A buys better equipment. Better equipment means faster execution. Faster execution means more projects per year. More projects means more data. More data makes their systems even smarter.

Company B is watching contracts they used to win go to Company A. They're losing good people to Company A because Company A pays more. They're bidding the same way they always have, but the math doesn't work anymore because someone else in the market has fundamentally changed the cost structure.

It is mathematically impossible for Company B to catch up by doing more of the same thing. You can't out-effort a structural advantage. You can't work nights and weekends to close a 7-point margin gap. The gap isn't effort — it's infrastructure. And infrastructure takes years to build.

Speed eats size

I've watched this play out in other industries. The big, established players don't lose to bigger companies. They lose to faster ones. Faster to estimate. Faster to mobilize. Faster to invoice. Faster to adapt when something goes wrong on a job.

A $10 million company with real technology infrastructure will outperform a $50 million company running on spreadsheets and phone calls. Not in every situation — the bigger company still has resources and relationships. But on a level playing field, speed wins. Every time. And technology is the only thing that creates speed at scale.

You can't hire your way to speed. You can't manage your way to speed. You can build systems that are fast, and then everything that touches those systems gets faster too.

The decision

A cheetah isn't born running 70 miles per hour. It's built for it — the light frame, the long legs, the oversized heart, the semi-retractable claws. Every part of the animal is optimized for speed. But it still has to decide to run. The gazelle doesn't catch itself.

Technology doesn't build itself either. The systems exist. The tools exist. The playbooks exist. But someone in the company has to make the decision to invest, to change, to build the infrastructure that turns a regular company into a fast company.

Most won't. Most will keep doing what they're doing because it works today. And they're right — it does work today. The problem is that "today" has an expiration date, and by the time you realize it's expired, the cheetah is already gone.

The companies that pick up the tool first don't just win. They eat everyone else's lunch, every day, forever. Because speed compounds, and you can't uncatch a cheetah once it's running.

The only question is whether you want to be the cheetah or the thing it's chasing.