What it is
Xtrata, formerly Strata, makes SABS, a patented prefabricated panel wall system, in a factory in Arizona. General contractors and developers liked the system once they saw it installed, and the factory had real capacity.
The company reached Fowler through a third party bringing people with construction reputations into the business. The seat opened as lead generation through his builder and developer relationships, with LÏEF Development pricing and bidding installation on the jobs that came in. It grew into a year-long seat across sales, marketing, pricing, brand and go-to-market, with collateral addressing six kinds of work: industrial, quick-service restaurant, hospitality, multifamily, office and education.
What Common Ground did
- Priced everything the channel sent and read the bids side by side. Quotes ran from a premium over wood framing to near parity with no formula connecting them, so deals were dying at the bid desk, not at the top of the funnel.
- Made the case to leadership, on the company's own bid data, that pricing rather than lead volume was the problem.
- Built a bid system of record on Next.js and Supabase: plan-stage tracking, a readiness state on every bid, a stale-contact alert and a read-only share for the manufacturer's team. For the first time 32 bids, 13 of them active at cut-over, sat in one screen, with every bid version, roughly 187 PDFs, archived underneath.
- Derived the labor-to-material relationship across 14 live bids and turned it into a bundled install rate.
- Had the rate checked outside the building: an outside architect compared it with real crew output, and the manufacturer's operations lead ran live test plans through his own labor calculator.
- Moved the pitch from a specialty premium to parity with conventional wood framing: SABS priced within about 5 percent of wood framing at standard material pricing, since an estimator compares every bid to wood on cost per square foot.
- Mapped where the plan sets came from. A sweep of the archive found 11 of its 28 projects carried the same architect's title block, and on those projects the wall assembly is chosen at schematic design, before any contractor bids, so outreach shifted toward architects and developers.
- Common Ground advised against the rename from Strata to Xtrata: the company, the system and the pipeline were unchanged, and a new name does not fix the number at the bid desk. Leadership made the call, and the pricing doctrine and channel plan carried through the rename intact.
Results
- $48 million of actual projects bid, relationships with 30 developers and general contractors across the country, and a $220 million pipeline, with potential national work beyond it.
- The manufacturer now budgets SABS labor by a metric the seat set, and its own labor calculator landed within 4 percent of the derived rate on each of three test plans, a spread of 6.3 points.
- The sales pitch moved from a specialty premium to parity with wood framing, answering the estimator's second question before it is asked.
- The seat grew from a lead-referral arrangement into a year-long engagement across marketing, sales, go-to-market, builder and developer relationships, branding and pricing.
External links
- Public data room: Xtrata Consulting Seat data room
Public record
Stories from this work
Holding the bid back to control how it landsXtrata's broker asked me to bid the shell for a 6-plex project for one of their clients, and the scope shifted twice before I could finalize a number.Insider truth
Two versions of the same bidA trucking company needed a construction bid to hand to their lender, while our own internal estimate was still mid-review with the project architect and the Strata subcontractor hadn't even been engaged on that portion Insider truth
Building the pricing model instead of trusting the gutLIEF's bidding relationship with a patented prefab wall-system manufacturer had grown into a real pipeline.Insider truth
Narrowing the bid on purpose, then catching your own math errorAn early bid for a new Filiberto's location went out as a full general contractor number, off a plan set that was only three sheets, no structural or mechanical drawings behind it at all.Mistake and repair
Turning a free trial into skin in the gameKyle Barichello, VP of Operations at Xtrata, ran a three project trial on our takeoff work, and speed was part of what he was scoring.Pivot
The pipeline was lying to usOur project trackers were showing statuses, bidding, awaiting funding, that didn't match reality anymore.Mistake and repair
Sending a bid you can't sign yetThe structural bid for a roughly 32,000 square foot project was ready, but there was no engineering behind the structure yet.The honest call
Building a scoreboard to solve a people problemProject information was scattered across disconnected trackers, no shared picture of what the team was actually working toward.Teaching moment
At a glance
| Project type | Go-to-market strategy and sales system design |
|---|---|
| Industry | Building products and construction technology |
| Seat | Fractional CRO and construction consultant |
| Ran through | Common Ground, with the bid work through LÏEF Development |
| Dates | 2025 to present |
| Duration | Ongoing since 2025 |
| Location | Arizona |
| Public data room | Xtrata Consulting Seat data room |
| Related pages | Xtrata, Lïef Development + Construction, Common Ground |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |