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Turning a free trial into skin in the game

After Xtrata's three-project takeoff trial, we drafted a paid pitch with a success fee so Kyle would not have to take our word.

Kyle Barichello, VP of Operations at Xtrata, ran a trial of our takeoff work across three projects, and part of his scoring was speed. All three came back the same day, one in under an hour, and a blind adversarial second pass had caught real errors before anything left the building.

I was unwilling to let a free trial stay a single favor. So a pitch was drafted to make Kyle a standing paying client. It is a hybrid: a modest monthly retainer covering a block of fast-turnaround takeoffs, plus a performance portion tied to whether the quoted projects close and get built.

The real bottleneck at Xtrata was never the product but quoting speed. A builder who sits one to two weeks waiting on a number drifts back to conventional framing. Recast our offer as an outsourced preconstruction arm, and we change from a cost line into a revenue lever. A success fee shifts the risk onto our own confidence in the work, so Kyle is not asked to buy on faith. Compared with AI-only takeoff tools, what sets us apart is takeoff by a human expert, with an adversarial quality check layered on top, rather than raw output the client has to recheck in full.

The operations lead summed up the trial this way: pretty damn close, I am sold. The paid pitch is still only a draft. Nothing goes to Kyle until I sign off on the exact wording, as always.

To turn a favor into a real relationship, put your own money behind your claim instead of asking the other party for trust. With the success fee in place, the incentive covers the faith, and Kyle does not have to.

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