A week of work per scope by hand
Before Belidor, every bid at Killian started the same way. Blake Lahr, their Senior Estimator, would read through the drawings and mark up anything that belonged in the bid comparison, copy it all into a pre-made Excel workbook, reformat it for that particular project, and then write every number in by hand on bid day.
We’d go through the drawings, mark them up for what we want to see in a bid comparison, copy it over into Excel, and write all the numbers by hand. There’s a lot of manual entry. One to two days to get through the drawings, another one to three days to get it into Excel. On average five days on any job.
For a team of three bidding two to four projects a month, that adds up quickly. With spec books running thousands of pages, it’s easy to miss things that can come back to bite you later as a change order.
An assistant for their system
Blake wasn’t looking for AI when we met him at the Advancing Preconstruction conference in Phoenix. What made him take a second look was that Belidor worked with the tools Killian already runs on, starting with BuildingConnected.
We don’t want to get away from BuildingConnected. It’s worked well for us. When I noticed we didn’t have to recreate the wheel, it brought the two together. It’s not another member of our team [like an AI estimator]. It’s an asset and an assistant for us to use. If we can use it to help write bid scopes, that’s one less thing we’re doing, and we can spend that time helping the subs.
A two month pilot delivered the full Belidor experience
Duane Prewitt, Killian’s Senior Vice President of Preconstruction, had been through this before with another platform, and it had left him with a lot of promises that never got done. So we agreed to earn it. The pilot ran for two months with Belidor working alongside Killian’s own process on five live projects, and we met every Monday to review the output together. When something didn’t work, we fixed it before the next call.
The pilot allowed both of us to work through some bumps in the road, and it made it an easier sell with folks in accounting. What convinced us was how quickly you moved. You were able to make things happen and give us something we could really use, quickly.
It means something to be able to text you and call you and get the answers we need. The support and the customer relations sold us on the product.
A week’s worth of work, done in one to two days
The hardest test of the pilot was MSU, a university project with four or five alternates where each alternate was almost its own job. Belidor generated the scope, flagged the RFI candidates, and the team used the output as their actual bid comparison.
It got us our RFIs quicker than we would have found them, which got them to the architect quicker and got our answers back. We used it as our bid comparison. It turned a week’s worth of work into one day, on a really complicated project. We still proofread it and changed some things to match what our company wants to see, but it did a really good job.
A smaller church remodel told the same story at a different scale: documents in, scope reviewed, and everything converted to Excel within 24 hours, on a job that would have taken two to three days by hand.
Then there was the item buried in the plans they would have missed
On one of the pilot projects, Belidor surfaced something Duane had missed in the documents, and it would have been worth forty to fifty thousand dollars if it had gone unnoticed.
It extracted information that I had missed in the documents that could have been forty or fifty thousand dollars. And I could see that easily happening on every project. There are so many pages and so many documents to get through in a short amount of time. Having it narrowed down to a concise list you can get through quickly, that’s the value.
For Blake, the timing of these catches matters as much as the catches themselves. A conflict found late arrives as a last-minute addendum, with subs scrambling and answers landing on bid day.
We wouldn’t have caught them all. Some get caught so much later in the project that it becomes a bigger hassle for everybody. The faster you find the RFIs, the faster you get the answers. Catching them in the first week of having the drawings rather than the last week is critical.
The math their CEO ran
Before Killian signed, Duane sat down with their CEO and walked him through a live project in Belidor. The logic that got it approved wasn’t ours. It was the CEO’s own.
He pointed it out himself: if it catches one item on each job, it pays for itself. We’re looking at running two to four jobs a month through it. And then there are the hours. We typically spend multiple days writing bid scopes, and it helps reduce significantly.
Killian converted to an annual contract on September 1, 2026.
Would they recommend it?
I would 100 percent recommend it. The bid comparisons most companies use are so outdated and so hands-on. A system like Belidor increases productivity, and the time can be spent on other things. It’s worth it.
It’s been easy to use, intuitive, and the support has been really good. Give it a shot.
How we measured
Draft, October 6, 2026. Quotes are from the September 8, 2026 recorded interviews with Blake Lahr and Duane Prewitt, lightly cleaned for reading. For Killian’s written approval before publishing. All figures are Killian’s own, stated on recorded calls in September 2026. Before-times are the team’s estimates of their manual process. The project times are the estimators’ accounts of specific pilot projects. The $40,000 to $50,000 figure is Duane Prewitt’s estimate of a specific item Belidor surfaced. Belidor generates the scopes and flags conflicts and RFI candidates; Killian’s estimators review, edit and issue them.