Why Construction, Manufacturing, and Energy Aren’t Resistant to Change—They’re Waiting for Solutions that Actually Work
There’s a narrative in tech that construction, manufacturing, and energy companies are resistant to change. I’ve spent 26 years in this space, and I think that narrative is backwards.
The real problem? Technology companies are slow to understand physical industries. That realization shaped everything about how we built Briq. Here’s what we learned.
Start With the Workflow, Not the Technology
Most enterprise software companies start with a technology and go looking for problems it can solve. That’s exactly backwards for physical industries.
When we started Briq, we thought we were building a data platform. We had a vision to aggregate project data through APIs and create a construction data cloud. Elegant idea. One problem: the systems these companies run on are 30 to 40 years old. No APIs. Our entire concept was technically impossible.
That failure taught us the first rule of building for physical industries: the technology has to bend to their reality, not the other way around.
So we shifted. Instead of requiring APIs that didn’t exist, we built technology that could log into legacy systems the same way a human would and extract the data. It wasn’t the elegant solution we originally envisioned. It was the solution that actually worked.
Solve the Problem They’ll Pay For Today
Early on, we made the mistake of targeting general contractors because that’s the world I came from. I’d spent years at Procore selling to GCs. It felt like the obvious move.
It wasn’t. The companies with the most acute pain were specialty contractors: electrical, mechanical, plumbing. They had the labor crunch. They had the back-office bottlenecks. They were the ones who couldn’t find anyone to fill the seats.
The lesson: your experience can blind you to where the real opportunity is. We had to unlearn what we thought we knew and pay attention to who was actually desperate for a solution.
Once we found them, we didn’t pitch a platform. We pitched one small thing. Do you like manually entering this data into two systems? No? Let us fix that. That’s it.
We call it micro-value. Find one pain point so obvious the customer can’t say no. Solve that. Then expand.
Earn Trust Before You Sell Vision
Physical industries have been burned by tech vendors for decades. Someone shows up with a polished demo, promises transformation, and then the product falls apart the moment it touches their actual environment. It happens over and over.
So when you walk in the door, you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from negative. They assume you don’t understand their business, because almost nobody who’s come before you did.
We learned to flip the sales process. Instead of leading with what our platform could do, we led with proof that we understood their specific problem. We partnered with financial associations in the industries we served. We studied their regulations, their terminology, their workflows. We showed up knowing more about their pain than they expected.
Only after we’d earned credibility did we talk about where we could take them. Vision comes after trust, not before.
Build for Expansion, Not Just Adoption
The companies that succeed in physical industries don’t just land deals. They expand them.
Our first engagement with a customer might be automating a single document type. That’s the foot in the door. But behind that is a roadmap: once we’ve proven value in accounts payable, we move to compliance. Then HR. Then operations.
The key is designing your product and your go-to-market around this expansion. Every initial use case should naturally lead to the next one. Every success should reveal adjacent problems you can solve.
We’ve had customers start with a single automation and expand to dozens across multiple departments. That only happens if you’re intentional about building for it.
The Opportunity Is Massive and Underserved
Physical industries account for a large share of GDP. They build everything around you. And they’ve been systematically ignored by technology companies who couldn’t be bothered to understand how they actually work.
The opportunity isn’t convincing these industries to adopt technology. They’ve been adopting technology for decades. The opportunity is building technology that’s actually worth adopting.
That means doing the hard work: learning their systems, understanding their workflows, earning their trust, and solving problems they’ll pay for today while building toward where they need to be tomorrow.
It’s slower than building another horizontal SaaS tool. It’s also a lot less crowded.
Bassem Hamdy is the CEO and co-founder of Briq, an autonomous workforce platform for physical industries. He previously served as SVP of Marketing and Strategy at Procore, where he helped scale the company from $10M to $100M ARR.
