How productivity technology is reshaping commercial contracting

By Jesse Sanchez. 

As contractors expand across states and service lines, Dataforma gives teams a scalable system that unifies documents, reporting, project data and field communication in real time. 

Commercial contractors are navigating larger footprints and more complex workflows than ever and Dataforma is positioning itself as a central system to manage it all. In this CoatingsTalk webinar, Brian Cook, the company’s senior vice president, discussed Dataforma’s evolution from a roofing shop solution to a widely adopted platform built for commercial contractors of all types. 

Brian’s connection to the contractor world began long before his current position with Dataforma. He shared, “I knew the owner of a commercial roofing company since I was a very young kid. I was good friends with his son, so I would mow the lawn. I would sweep up the shop.” As he got older, those small tasks turned into summer work on the roof itself, giving him firsthand experience with the demands crews face every day. His years spent on roofs and in project offices shaped the problems Dataforma set out to solve. “We came out as the number one service management software for commercial contractors, but now we've gotten into a lot more of tracking production jobs, which is a lot of what we're going to get into today.” 

That evolution, Brian explained, reflects how rapidly contractor needs have shifted alongside industry growth. As companies expand across regions and add new service lines, keeping processes consistent becomes increasingly difficult. Leaders need a system that scales with them, gives offices the right level of separation and still brings all performance data back into one place. “We had every single weird situation you could think of,” Brian said, noting union and nonunion employees, multiple offices and multi-entity structures. “What’s lucky for our contractors is when we run into these situations, it's already baked into Dataforma.” 

This is especially critical for firms running simultaneous jobs across multiple states. Old processes relied on long drives, paper notes and outdated file systems. Brian recalled the frustration well. “We found out we had two or three estimators working on the same bid but we didn't know because we were at different offices.” Shared data solves that issue instantly, and contractors no longer lose time on retracing steps. 

As commercial portfolios grow more complex and geographically dispersed, the contractors finding the most success are those turning this newfound clarity into a competitive edge. By replacing disconnected spreadsheets, paper trails and siloed offices with a single source of data, platforms like Dataforma give leaders the visibility they need to protect margins and keep projects on track. For many firms, that shift is no longer a nice-to-have but a strategic necessity as they look to scale responsibly, serve multi-site clients with confidence and build teams that can make better decisions in real time. 

Read the transcript, Listen to the conversation or Watch the webinar to learn more about how Dataforma supports contractors adapting to a changing industry!