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BLUEPRINT

Case Study · 003

JK Welding · $2.4M of pipeline tracked in 90 days.

$2.4M

Pipeline tracked

−72%

Quote turnaround

−18 days

DSO reduction

The situation

Where they started.

JK Welding's reputation in the Texas oil-and-gas corridor brought consistent inbound — but quotes lived in spreadsheets, sales orders lived in QuickBooks, and the estimator was the only one who knew what was in flight.

The owner spent more than half of his week chasing AR. Cash that should have been working in the business sat in unfollowed-up invoices. A 4-day quote cycle was costing them deals to faster competitors.

The diagnostic

What the audit revealed.

Audit walked the full job lifecycle from inbound RFQ to final payment. The breakages were not technology — they were the absence of a connecting layer between the people who already knew their craft.

  • Finding 01

    Average quote turnaround 4 days. Lost deals correlated 1:1 with > 48-hour response.

  • Finding 02

    No central pipeline. Estimator's email inbox WAS the pipeline.

  • Finding 03

    DSO 71 days. AR follow-up was happening when the owner remembered.

  • Finding 04

    Job costing reactive — knew margin at year-end, not job-end.

The build

Divisions deployed.

  1. 01

    Systems

    pipeline rebuilt around quote → SOW → job → invoice. unified inbox across email, calls, and SMS. job-cost dashboard in plain English.

  2. 02

    AI

    quote-drafting agent trained on historical jobs and material costs. AR follow-up agent that runs every Monday and Thursday.

  3. 03

    Marketing

    targeted paid + content focused on procurement managers and GC project managers. closed-loop attribution to signed SOW.

  4. 04

    Financial

    weekly bookkeeping. job costing surfaced on the same dashboard the estimator uses. monthly margin review.

The outcome

Numbers before. Numbers after.

Metric Before After Δ
Pipeline tracked $0 (untracked) $2.4M built
Quote turnaround 4 days 14 hr −72%
DSO 71 days 53 days −18 days
Owner hours / wk 62 46 −16 hrs
Close rate (RFQ→SOW) 21% 34% +13 pts

i used to wake up worried about cash. now i wake up worried about which job to do next. that's the upgrade.

Owner · JK Welding

What's next

Year 2 is hiring — the owner is bringing on an ops manager that the system + AI handoff is built around. Financial division is leading the multi-entity structure work to separate the shop from the real estate.

Related work

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