How Connect Technology Group went live on BuildOps in under a month with Smart Deploy

Connect Technology Group (CTG) has spent 26 years building a reputation in Dallas-Fort Worth for showing up prepared. The leadership team, President Sean Flynn and Operations/Estimating lead Denis Weers, started the company together after years working side by side at a previous employer, and that same "we've seen it before" mentality shapes how CTG runs jobs today: electrical systems, structured cabling and fiber, security and access control, and commercial AV, for customers across the DFW market.

That same experience made the team unusually clear-eyed about software. BuildOps wasn't CTG's first platform — it was its fourth in nearly five years. Each time, the promise was the same. Each time, something broke down in the follow-through.

Customer snapshot

Industry: Commercial electrical, cabling, security, and AV contracting
Location: Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas
Services: Electrical systems, structured cabling/fiber, security & access control, commercial audio-visual
Implementation timeline: Kicked off August 3, live by September 1, powered by Smart Deploy

The challenge: worn out by software that didn't hold up past the sales pitch

Flynn compares CTG's software history to "the Shriner Circus" — four platforms in about five years, each one supposed to be the answer. The most recent one, before BuildOps, left scars. Support was routed overseas and hard to get real traction with, and the team felt boxed in whenever they needed something changed or configured differently.

By the time CTG committed to BuildOps, the team was mid-transition and, in Flynn's words, in "complete chaos and pandemonium" — juggling two platforms, migrating data, and trying to keep quoting and invoicing moving without missing a beat. They'd been burned enough times to be skeptical of anything promising to be different.

The solution: Smart Deploy, and an implementation manager the team could count on

CTG went live through Smart Deploy, BuildOps's guided implementation path. Built from more than 750 successful launches, it pairs a self-guided setup tool with a best-practice playbook and hands-on coaching from an implementation team — designed to get commercial contractors from signed contract to running their business in as little as four weeks, without the months-long wait of a traditional implementation.

What sold the team wasn't just the product, it was the process. Flynn didn't mince words comparing his BuildOps implementation to the three that came before it: "Night and day. Night and day from the customer service, the follow-up, the engagement, the process, the procedure."

Much of that came down to his implementation manager, Jonathan Wembo. Wembo paired Smart Deploy's guided setup tool with steady, structured check-ins — and built enough of a relationship with the team that Flynn singled him out by name: "Jonathan's communication level was above and beyond anybody we've dealt with in the past, from any other company." When CTG was ready to push toward go-live faster than planned, Wembo held them back instead, making sure the configuration would hold up once the doors opened.

For Weers, the format solved a problem he'd run into with every past implementation: months of training up front, only to relearn everything once the system actually went live. With Smart Deploy, configuration and training happened at the same time, in the live tenant.

"I don't like doing stuff twice," he said. "Training and setting it up live at the same time is so much easier."

Deidra Coleman, CTG's office manager, felt the same shift. "We had training before, but we didn't have a way to actually do things, or a training account where your work didn't disappear once you went live," she said. "Being able to use the actual tenant but not risk messing up the whole thing while you're learning — that's very helpful."

The team even brought AI into their own prep work, using it to reformat an 18,000-line parts and pricing catalog for import — turning a job that could have eaten a week of manual data entry into something manageable in a fraction of the time.

The value: live in under a month, and already recommending it

Two weeks after go-live, CTG was already running quoting, invoicing, project management, and time-and-materials work through BuildOps.

One of the first tangible wins: their first quote issued through BuildOps was sent and viewed by a customer — a small milestone, but one that already felt faster and smoother than issuing quotes through their old platform.

For Flynn, the bigger shift is visibility. Instead of stitching together numbers from spreadsheets and disconnected reports, he now has one customizable dashboard covering the whole business. "Visibility into my whole company on one platform is huge."

The team was intentional about adoption, too — mandating BuildOps Academy training for the full staff ahead of go-live, not just the core implementation team. As Flynn put it, the logic was simple: "Garbage in is garbage out." Get the team trained and the data clean from day one, and the rest of the platform pays off.

Flynn's take on Smart Deploy, in his own words: "I would pick it 100% of the time."

Looking ahead

CTG is continuing its transition off legacy systems, with a goal of being fully off its old platform by the end of the month. But for a team that had grown wary of implementations, going live in under thirty days — and choosing to slow down rather than speed up along the way — has already reset what they expect from a software partner.