Work record / Brand / Xtrata

Xtrata: the problem was price, and leads were never the issue

Xtrata came to me with a lead-generation ask. Once I priced everything the channel sent and read the bids together, the real problem was at the bid desk, and I made that case to leadership.

The seat

I have been Xtrata's fractional CRO and construction consultant since 2025, working in Arizona. The seat sits under Common Ground, and LÏEF Development handles the bid work. The seat started as lead generation through my builder and developer relationships. It grew into a year-long role across sales, marketing, pricing, brand and go-to-market, with collateral aimed at six types of work. Those are industrial, quick-service restaurant, hospitality, multifamily, office and education.

Sector	Building products and construction technology
Type of work	Go-to-market strategy and sales system design
Where	Arizona
Years	2025 to present
How long	Ongoing since 2025
Through	Common Ground, with LÏEF Development doing the bidding.
Credits	Common Ground Jesse Fowler, Fractional CRO and construction consultant

What I was brought in to decide

Xtrata, which used to be called Strata, manufactures SABS, a patented prefabricated panel wall system, in an Arizona factory. Once general contractors and developers saw it installed, they liked it. The factory also had genuine room to build more.

A third party who was bringing people with construction reputations into the company made the introduction to me. LÏEF Development would price and bid installation on any job that came in.

What we did

I priced everything the channel sent us and read the bids next to each other. Quotes ran from a premium over wood framing to nearly even with it, and no formula connected one to the next. Deals were dying at the bid desk, well downstream of the top of the funnel.
I took that to leadership, using the company's own bid data, and argued that pricing was the problem and lead volume was not.
We built a bid system of record on Next.js and Supabase. It has plan-stage tracking, a readiness state on every bid, an alert when a contact goes stale, and a read-only view for the manufacturer's team. For the first time, 32 bids lived on one screen, 13 of them active at cut-over, with every version of every bid, roughly 187 PDFs, archived behind them.
We worked out how labor relates to material across 14 live bids and turned that into a bundled install rate.
The rate got checked by people outside the building. An outside architect set it against actual crew output. The manufacturer's operations lead took live test plans and ran them through his own labor calculator.
I changed the pitch, dropping the specialty premium and going for parity with conventional wood framing. Priced at standard materials, SABS came in within about 5 percent of wood, because an estimator measures every bid against wood on cost per square foot.
We also mapped where the plan sets were coming from. A sweep of the archive showed 11 of its 28 projects had the same architect's title block. On those projects someone chooses the wall assembly at schematic design, ahead of any contractor bid. We therefore pointed our outreach at architects and developers.
Common Ground advised against renaming the company from Strata to Xtrata. Nothing about the company, the system or the pipeline had changed, and a new name cannot repair the number at the bid desk. Leadership decided. The pricing doctrine and the channel plan came through the rename intact.

Results

We have bid $48 million of actual projects, built relationships with 30 developers and general contractors around the country, and put together a $220 million pipeline. More national work could come on top of that.
The manufacturer now budgets SABS labor with a metric that came from this seat. On each of three test plans its own labor calculator came within 4 percent of the rate we derived, with a spread of 6.3 points.
The pitch moved off a specialty premium and onto parity with wood framing. That answers the estimator's second question before it gets asked.
What began as a lead-referral arrangement turned into a year-long engagement. It spans marketing and sales, go-to-market, relationships with builders and developers, plus branding and pricing.

The lesson

Look at the data before you add a salesperson. From outside the building, a lead problem and a pricing problem look the same.

Public record

Xtrata

Stories from this work

Building a scoreboard to solve a people problemOne shared tracker fixed a visibility problem and a quiet performance problem together.Building the pricing model instead of trusting the gutLIEF was pricing bid by bid on judgment, so I had the team build a model from every bid we had actually run.Holding the bid back to control how it landsI delivered a shell bid and asked the broker to wait so I could reach the client first.Narrowing the bid on purpose, then catching my own math errorA Filiberto's bid built off three sheets got cut to shell labor, and then I caught two mistakes of my own.Sending a bid you can't sign yetA roughly 32,000 square foot structural bid had no engineering behind it, so I sent it as a probe and verified the takeoff myself.The pipeline was lying to usOur trackers showed stale statuses, so I fixed it with a daily habit and a standing briefing instead of a new tool.Turning a free trial into skin in the gameAfter Xtrata's three-project takeoff trial, we drafted a paid pitch with a success fee so Kyle would not have to take our word.Two versions of the same bidA trucking company needed a bid for its lender while our internal estimate was still being reviewed, so I planned two documents.

Questions about Xtrata, answered

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Xtrata on the Common Ground wiki.

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