Prepared by James Andrew Walsh, Amplify Luxury
February 19, 2026
On February 18, 2026, James Walsh of Amplify Luxury met with Marc Markwell (CFO), Bryan (VP), Moe (IT Manager), and Randy McReynolds of Artistry Building Group at SNC's office in Sparks, Nevada. The purpose was to explore how AI-powered automation could address operational challenges across SNC's business.
The conversation was wide-ranging and substantive, covering estimating, field operations, payroll processing, equipment management, and sales. What emerged was a clear picture of a well-run company with deep institutional knowledge — and significant opportunities to turn that knowledge into automated, real-time operational intelligence.
SNC operates a mixed fleet of owned and rented equipment, with roughly half the fleet being rentals at $2,000–$3,000 per day. Equipment telemetry exists through E360 and manufacturer systems, reporting utilization, idle time, and hours running.
The problem: this data is only reviewed monthly — and even then, it's six weeks after the end of the previous month. By the time anyone sees that a piece of equipment sat idle for a week, the money is already spent and the conversation is stale.
The gap between what timecards report and what the equipment actually ran is significant. In one example discussed, rental invoices showed 20 hours of runtime for a month while timecards reported 160 hours. Multiple foremen sometimes log the same piece of equipment on their timecards, inflating reported hours from 40 to 160 in a week.
Bryan put it plainly: "There's so much money here. We're talking millions."
Every week, timecard data flows from Dispatch to HeavyJob to Spectrum through a multi-step audit process involving four to five people. They're checking for:
Bryan, the fastest person in the company at this review, spends three hours on it. Payroll editing alone consumes over 10 hours per week. The full audit chain involves superintendents, foremen, project managers, and two payroll staff — all looking at the same data for different types of errors.
Bryan described a field sales program he built 30 years ago that allowed sales reps to generate proposals on-site in 30 minutes. The concept was sound: input the square footage, number of islands, distance from the hot plant, product type, and area-based pricing — and hand the customer a proposal before leaving.
That program was never adopted at SNC. Today, the process takes three days: a field rep writes up the details, hands it to someone who prices it, who hands it back, and then the rep goes to sell.
Bryan's cardinal rule: "Never leave the customer. Finish what you're doing, sell it, hand them a proposal, get the sale."
When SNC receives plans and specifications for a new job, someone sits down and reads through them page by page, looking for specific items: railroad insurance requirements, special conditions, key details, and potential omissions.
Marc described a common scenario: a note on the plans references a masonry wall, but there's no corresponding detail. It gets missed. Then out on the job, the crew discovers the requirement — and it's too late to account for it in the bid.
The process is done both on paper (Darcy prints and reviews page by page) and on screen (Sarah and the estimators review PDFs). Either way, it's hours of manual searching for information that should be instantly identifiable.
SNC's estimating work falls into two categories:
Plans and specs are provided with defined quantities. This is more structured and repeatable. Quantities should flow directly into the bidding software, with crews auto-assembled based on historical patterns. Four full-time estimators handle this work using SharpeSoft Estimator and AGTEK for earthwork takeoffs.
Plans are sometimes only 30% complete when SNC is asked for a budget. The team builds quantities from incomplete information, and the scope shifts as plans develop. Marc described it as "building the plane as we take off from the ground."
On the public works side, Bryan identified the cookie-cutter opportunity: jobs that repeat with variations in depth, speed, and scale. These follow predictable patterns and shouldn't require an estimator to start from scratch each time.
Martha operates AGTEK for earthwork takeoffs — a system James has deep personal experience with, having spent thousands of hours on AGTEK digitizer boards doing earthwork takeoffs as a teenager for his father's construction estimating company.
A theme ran through every topic: the data SNC needs to make better decisions already exists — in HeavyJob, in Spectrum, in E360, in Dispatch, in SharpeSoft. The challenge is that these systems don't talk to each other in real time.
Bryan summed it up: "You can't make decisions because you don't have the data. Even though the data exists in these different places, you can't put it together."
Equipment runs for a week while no one knows it's idle. Timecards go through five layers of manual review because there's no automated cross-check. Sales proposals take three days because the pricing lives in one place and the field data lives in another. Production quantities go untracked because the team is too short-staffed to measure what they should be producing.
Four patterns emerged from our conversation:
Every system has valuable information. The gap is in bringing it together for real-time decision-making.
Monthly reviews and six-week reporting cycles mean problems are discovered long after the money is spent.
Four to five people auditing timecards, estimators entering quantities by hand, field staff flipping through plan pages — experienced professionals doing work that should be automated.
SNC has strong leadership, deep experience, and a culture of doing things right. The opportunity isn't to change how SNC works — it's to give SNC's people the tools to work at the speed their expertise deserves.
A conversation with Mike and Martha to understand the specific estimating workflows, AGTEK usage, and SharpeSoft processes where automation would have the most impact.
Focused on the highest-impact opportunity identified in this session, with a clear scope, timeline, and deliverables.
We're excited about what's possible here. The combination of SNC's operational depth and AI-powered automation has the potential to set a new standard for what a construction company can achieve.
— James Walsh, Amplify Luxury
SNC Discovery Session — Summary & Opportunities