“A lot of what we have been doing is feeling our way in the dark, we had no other option” - Danny Stuart from Workstream knows a thing or two about building.

An interview with Danny Stuart, CEO of Workstream, by Joe Gorman NDRC Programme Manager.

Sophie McDonald and Danny Stuart of Workstream

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a quantity surveyor (QS) with extensive career experience around building sites, Danny Stuart didn’t waste time when it came to breaking ground on his startup. The co-founder and CEO of Workstream references the ‘move fast and break things’ approach to product development: “Nobody knows the answer and sometimes we have to throw sh*t at the wall quickly to get there.” It has worked: Workstream’s growing customer base and impressive MRR led them to closing an $843k pre-seed round just last month.

Workstream is a commercial management platform for construction companies to oversee their project finances, helping to close the gap between the forecasts that project managers make and their actual spend. Usually, you are forced to make assumptions about your outlay due to data lags from the supply chain, leading to discrepancies of up to 25% in Danny’s experience, often only discovered 60-90 days later when detailed reporting is available. This often costs large-scale projects tens of millions in wasted spend. Workstream provides real-time live data to give managers immediate commercial insight into the financial performance of their projects.  

Belfast-bred Danny noticed the problem of data management in his days as a QS across Ireland and the UK, when he would be called into distressed or disputed cases where “the project was basically on fire.” As someone who “despises seeing waste”, he was shocked by how some projects were planned:

“You would ask them: where are all the payments and backup? And they would say: “It’s that pile of paper over there.” On a £250 million power plant. Why is everything being done on paper? And then when you start to go through the bits of paper, you realise that the problem happened 12 months previously.”

Danny Stuart, CEO of Workstream during NDRC Accelerator

The problem is only getting worse in an industry where large-scale construction planning is a perennial challenge: “Contracts pass the risk on to the supply chain, and there's a lot of mechanisms within contracts for this now. With infrastructure projects, they also become political items, adding complexity.” 

Danny discusses the back-and-forth that comes with infrastructure projects that spend years in development purgatory, then need to be produced in a shortened timeframe: “They have an idea of how much it's going to cost, but they haven't fully quantified the risk. Before you know it, a hospital that was forecasted at a few hundred million euro now costs two billion. The Hinkley Nuclear Power Plant was forecasted at £18 billion and it's now up over £37 billion. They thought they could derisk it through contracts and ended up compounding the problem.”

Short-term thinking on large-scale projects is something that “blows my mind every day” according to Danny: “It’s not just poor data management that causes problems, it’s the lack of a consistent reporting style and structure in the chain of command: from contractor to division to parent group.” He started Workstream to create an industry-standard commercial report rather than the current situation: a hodgepodge of different report styles and formats “that aren’t aligned and are rammed with assumptions”. 

Danny and the Workstream team are focused on the utility and infrastructure sector, which filters into subsectors like water, energy, wind, and telecoms. The hot area right now is data centres: “A lot of civil contractors from Ireland have established themselves in Europe, building data centres. So we have those links as a valuable asset to leverage as we expand into Europe”.

Now, the thing driving Workstream’s growth is stickiness: “When a contractor integrates their supply chain into our product, they will onboard fifty other subcontractors with instant access, that will get value from it. So it’s really fifty new customers that we can target.”

This is no accident - the team was obsessive about the cold start problem: “We need everybody on the project on our platform. But how do we get everybody onto the platform?” Targeting contractors first, the team started digitising track sheets, the record of materials and work required on a project. “We built what we thought would get them the greatest value the quickest,” says Danny. From there, they realised that subcontractors coveted a programme that tracked time spent working and billing effectively, so they built a timesheet feature. This opened the door for Workstream to then build a host of features addressing the cost of a project, and determining the value of it as a result.

Sophie McDonald, CPO of Workstream

Why is Danny Stuart a founder? He admits that it “all sounds really clichéd,” but it was in his blood. His Dad was a builder and entrepreneur who helped him to “join the dots” and take risks with a maxim that stuck with his son: “If somebody asks you to do something, you tell them you can do it, and then you quickly find somebody else who can.”

Danny didn’t know how to approach the build of Workstream, so he found someone who could: Sophie McDonald, an experienced data analyst who serves as the Chief Product Officer. 

Once Danny had “pestered” Sophie into helping him on the project he started in 2018, she was instrumental in getting their development process shipshape, formalising communication, tightening the feedback loop with users, using “a better vocabulary to describe key features”, and hauling the team away from a haphazard comms stack of email, WhatsApp, and an Excel spreadsheet. Her influence has helped the team parse through “what the customer wants, and what the customer actually needs,” by “finding the actual pain.”

In Danny’s eyes, Dublin is “effectively the epicenter of the technology world, outside of San Francisco.” Is this why the NDRC Accelerator is a good fit for Workstream? “To be able to link into that (NDRC) global network is number one, and the real-life experience from mentors. A lot of what we have been doing is feeling our way in the dark, we had no other option. If we had got onto an accelerator (before), we might not have learned some of the hard lessons, but we might have got there quicker.”

“I suppose the one thing that has surprised me about myself is that I can convince others. I usually can convince myself easily enough that I know the right road to take. But you need to convince other people that you're on the right road and we can do it together. We’ll get there. It might be a year or two years. But we’ll get there.”