For hiring, I’ve had the best luck focusing on reliability, communication, and willingness to learn. Skills can be taught, but attitude and work ethic are much harder to train. Partnering with local career centers and schools has also been a great way to find people looking for experience and growth opportunities.
For AI, I’ve been using Claude quite a bit, but I’ve customized it around my workflow. I feed it job details and use it to generate scopes of work, proposals, bid letters, and customer communications. I still review everything before it goes out, but it saves a lot of time on the administrative side.
One thing I’ve noticed is that AI has been more helpful for creating professional proposals and customer-facing documents than it has been for the actual pricing. Most contractors already know how to price the work—the time savings comes from turning job details into something polished and getting it in front of the customer quickly.
