Sessions and Speakers

Pick up your badge, score some swag, and get settled before the first session kicks off.

Book one-on-one time with the BuildOps Customer Success team for hands-on help with your account. Bring your questions and leave with answers specific to how your business runs.

Start from a blank report and leave with one you'll actually run Monday morning. Bring your laptop, build it live alongside a BuildOps expert, and save it so it keeps answering your questions long after Forge.

Go-live is the starting line. ATX shares how contractors keep getting more out of BuildOps after implementation, from tightening day-to-day operations to measuring the return on the investment.

A live debate where you're the judge. Experts and contractors put hot takes on job costing and profitability on trial, from PO limits to manual re-entry, and the audience votes Brilliant or BS on each one.

Service agreements should be your steadiest revenue. Bring your laptop and build one right from the start with a BuildOps expert, then learn what to check before renewal so small setup mistakes don't become billing disputes.

AI is already changing how fire protection work gets inspected and kept compliant. InspectPoint co-founder Drew Slocum covers what AI can and can't do across sprinkler, alarm, and extinguisher systems, plus a first look at InspectPoint's new AI agents.

Growth has a way of outrunning the back office. Mark Severance of RKL eSolutions walks through the signs you've outgrown QuickBooks or a legacy ERP, and how BuildOps and Sage Intacct Construction connect field and financial data.

Keep the office and the crew working off the same page. Bring your laptop and set up current drawings, field task lists, and timesheets in BuildOps live, so double entry between the field and the office goes away.

Construction is demanding enough without complex tax rules on top. Avalara shows how automated compliance handles project-level sales and use tax, multi-state registrations, M&A growth, and property tax right inside your workflows.

Your field team already captured the hours. See how approved BuildOps timesheets, jobs, cost codes, and labor classifications flow straight into Miter, so payroll runs without exports and fully burdened job costing uses the data techs already entered.

Wrap up day one food and drinks. Reconnect with familiar faces, meet the contractors you'll be learning from all week, and get to know the BuildOps team before the main stage opens Thursday.

Plan you day, score some swag, and get settled for the start of the second day of Forge.

Forge starts here. BuildOps CEO Alok Chanani and Chief Product Officer Will Lehrmann share where commercial contracting is headed, what we've built alongside you this year, and what's coming next. Expect real customer results, first looks at new product, and a clear view of the road ahead.

Switching platforms is the easy decision. Making it stick is the real work. Patrick Thomasson of Advanced Commercial Group shares the playbook his team used in its first 150 days on BuildOps.

Data from more than 1,500 commercial contractors maps five levels of performance, from running on instinct to built to scale. See where your business sits and what moving up one level is worth for a $10M shop, with Ryan Lucas of American Refrigeration.

Finance Hub brings invoices, bills, payments, exceptions, and period controls into one financial control center inside BuildOps. Walk through real close scenarios from field activity to ERP handoff, and see what's available today and what's next.

Book one-on-one time with the BuildOps Customer Success team for hands-on help with your account. Bring your questions and leave with answers specific to how your business runs.

Your best salesperson might already be on the truck. Bring your laptop and build the Revenue Finder pipeline live, turning what techs spot in the field into recommendations, quotes, and booked jobs without turning them into salespeople.

The next layer for teams who've outgrown the basic report builder. Bring your laptop and build multi-source reports, connect BuildOps data to Power BI, and automate distribution so the right report lands in the right inbox.

Your asset records can drive labor savings today and project revenue tomorrow. See how nClarity and BuildOps turn condition data into dispatch-ready work orders, with contractors seeing 60%+ labor efficiency on PM work.

Trade notes with peers who carry the same weight. Owners, executives, and finance leaders compare what's working, what isn't, and where they're investing next in an open, peer-led conversation.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. built a career on the track and a business off it. He sits down with BuildOps CEO Alok Chanani to talk racing, entrepreneurship, and giving back. Pull up a seat for the stories, the lessons, and what it takes to keep winning long after the checkered flag.

Your tech-to-back-office ratio quietly decides whether you're scaling or just getting bigger. Average shops run about five techs per back-office employee and the best run closer to seven. Hunt Electric's Gordon Coles shares how to grow the field without growing the office.

Revenue leaks at six predictable points around your quotes, from recommendations never quoted to approved quotes that never become jobs. Open a live queue and see how OpsAI finds each one, drafts the fix, and routes it for one-click approval.

Done right, time tracking feeds payroll, job costing, and billing all at once. Bring your laptop and set it up live with a BuildOps expert, then learn how to audit entries before they turn into month-end cleanup.

Run your sales pipeline in the same system as your service and project work. Bring your laptop and set up CRM+ live, tracking leads and opportunities and turning a won deal into a job without re-keying a thing.

Paper timesheets still show up on jobsites running drones and VR. Dynamic Systems Inc. switched to AI-powered timesheets with facial verification and recovered $260,000 a year in foremen time. Randy Smith shares how, with SmartBarrel founder Albert Bou Fadel.

Compare notes with the people running jobs day to day. Project and construction ops leaders swap what's working on scheduling, closeout, and field-to-office coordination in an open, peer-led conversation.

Scaling well means deciding what looks the same at every location and what stays local. Andy Nguyen of NexCore joins Billy Robison from BuildOps to share how they built one way of working across a growing footprint, from multiple locations to operating companies joining one at a time. You'll leave with a clearer way to decide what to standardize in your own business.

Growth doesn't have to wait on hiring. The best-run operators pull about 65% more revenue per technician with the same size crew. Jeff Rowland and Layunie Matthews of B & L Glass share how their team redesigned the technician's day to get there.

Since last Forge, the BuildOps team has been on site with your techs, running discovery and digging into the data. See what we heard, what's improved in the mobile app, and a sneak peek at the roadmap, followed by open Q&A.

The basics done right, so the rest of BuildOps works the way it should. Bring your device and fill out a complete service ticket and log a recommendation live. A great fit for teams early in rollout or onboarding new techs.

Find out a job is over budget while there's still time to fix it. Bring your laptop and build a live forecast that tracks cost against budget as the job progresses, with early-warning signals set up before you leave.

Standing up BuildOps and an ERP at the same time comes down to sequencing. Alliance Solutions Group shares which decisions to lock first, where dual implementations stall, and a client example where getting the order right took weeks out of go-live.

Swap playbooks with the people keeping service running. Ops leaders and service managers compare how they handle dispatch, capacity, and team performance in an open, peer-led conversation.

The best agreement programs quietly generate real extra work, with agreement customers driving roughly a third more non-agreement revenue. GT Mechanical and Blauch Brothers share how they turn routine visits into revenue without turning techs into salespeople.

AI that does the work can cover for a stretched office and dispatch team without adding headcount. Omnia Mechanical and Jolma Electric share how smart dispatch, visit summaries, and OpsAI in the field help them catch work earlier and get ahead of emergencies.

When rates and credit are tight, your receivables are the cheapest capital you have. Danny Kilgore of SRV Temperature Solutions shares how the best shops get paid faster through decisions made long before the invoice goes out.

Complete invoices go out faster and get paid faster. Bring your laptop and work through your job closeout live, including where an AI agent catches missing line items before the invoice leaves.

Project money leaks a little at a time through late costs, budget drift, and open punchlist items. See what BuildOps built this year to close those gaps, from more accurate cost data to faster closeout and better submittals, plus a look at what's next.

Get the right tech on the right job the first time. Bring your laptop and set up skills and certifications by technician, see how Smart Dispatch uses that data to match techs to jobs, and learn what to audit so certifications don't quietly lapse.

Talk shop with the people closest to the field. Field ops leaders share how they run mobile workflows, keep techs moving, and get clean data back to the office in an open, peer-led conversation.

Most HVAC businesses track jobs, invoices, and customers in great detail. Few track the equipment they service beyond job notes and model/serial numbers. Bluon shows what the industry loses when equipment data stays incomplete, and what changes in sales, service, and valuation when companies use asset intelligence the right way.

Forge is taking over Petco Park. Spend the night with the contractors setting the pace, then cap it off with a party that's on a whole different level.

Book one-on-one time with the BuildOps Customer Success team for hands-on help with your account. Bring your questions and leave with answers specific to how your business runs.

AI pays off when the business is ready for it. Steph Hastings covers what AI-ready really means, a crawl-walk-run rollout framework, and five questions to ask any vendor. Kateleen Jackson of Crockett Facilities Services brings the operator's view.

Benchmark your service department on five KPIs that define a healthy service business, from work orders per tech per day to pull-through revenue. Then see the BuildOps features and agents closing those gaps today, plus what's next on the roadmap.

Start from a blank report and leave with one you'll actually run Monday morning. Bring your laptop, build it live alongside a BuildOps expert, and save it so it keeps answering your questions long after Forge.

Month-end close gets shorter when problems get fixed the day they happen. Bring your laptop and work hands-on in the newly launched Finance Hub, clearing sync failures in the Ops Inbox and matching payroll, card spend, and non-PO bills to the right job in the Cost Inbox. Leave ready to keep the books clean every day, walk into close prepared, and trust your job cost number.

RSC Electrical & Mechanical Contractors started on BuildOps with service in 2023, then built daily notices and custom reports that flag open jobs, unbilled invoices, and bills on the wrong job the day they happen. Andre Bolden and Nadine Grant share what they built first, what it took to get fluent in the dashboard, and how they decided when to expand into projects. You'll leave knowing which reports to build first and when to add projects.

Haynes Mechanical closed June with zero variances for the first time. CFO Patrick McFarlen and BuildOps' Rishabh Dave break down how Finance Hub's daily visibility into cost errors made it possible.

Pyrocomm moved its entire business onto BuildOps in about three months and went live in January 2026. Nearly a year later, they're still pushing for more. Patrick Ozier of Pyrocomm joins Chris Karcher, BuildOps VP of Product, for an honest look at year one. They'll cover why Pyrocomm chose one platform to run the business, what owning your data makes possible, how a close partnership with the product team shaped what got built, and where both companies go from here, including how Pyrocomm uses AI inside and outside of BuildOps. Expect straight answers on what worked, what was hard, and what they'd tell any contractor weighing the same move.

Bring sales into the same system that runs your operations. Follow one deal end to end in CRM+, from opportunity and estimate to branded proposal, e-signature, and a job in Core, with no re-entry. Everything shown is live today.

Keep the paper trail with your GC airtight. Bring your laptop and set up submittals, RFIs, and change orders in BuildOps live, so nothing falls through the cracks between the field, the office, and the general contractor.

The next layer for teams who've outgrown the basic report builder. Bring your laptop and build multi-source reports, connect BuildOps data to Power BI, and automate distribution so the right report lands in the right inbox.

Connect with women building careers across the trades. Swap stories, advice, and contacts with peers from across the BuildOps community.

Forge ends the way it should, celebrating the contractors who keep the world running. Sahil Bloom, NYT best-selling author, sits down with BuildOps CEO Alok Chanani to kick things off, followed by Customer Awards and a look at where to go from here with co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Steve Chew. Come for the winners, stay for what’s next, and head home with a plan.