The company behind STrOp is Confianza Services, LLC. Confianza is usually translated as "trust," and the translation undersells it. English trust runs one direction — I trust you, you hold something of mine. Confianza names the relationship itself, and it only exists when it runs both ways. Someone you have confianza with is someone you can talk to straight, ask a real favor of, bring bad news to early. Both sides give something up — distance, formality, the option to hedge — and both sides come out ahead of where they'd be alone.

We named the company after it because that's the only kind of relationship worth building a business on. And because construction — an industry that physically cannot function without people cooperating — has been starved of it for fifty years.

We need to build more than we ever have

Housing we're short millions of units on. A grid being rebuilt for loads it was never sized for. Water infrastructure past its design life. Whole neighborhoods to put back after fires. Every one of those is a promise that gets kept by somebody in a truck at 6 a.m., or doesn't get kept at all.

Demand isn't the constraint. The constraint is capacity — how many crews exist, and how much of their day actually reaches the work.

And we build worse than we did in 1970

Not slower growth. Decline. Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson at Chicago Booth gave the definitive paper a title that's hard to improve on — The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector — and the headline finding is that value added per construction worker was about 40% lower in 2020 than in 1970. By 2020, construction's labor productivity and total factor productivity had both fallen below their 1950 levels, while the economy as a whole was up 290% and 230%. Manufacturing — the other industry whose job is assembling physical objects — went up more than nine-fold over the same stretch.

The obvious objection is that this is a measurement artifact: construction output is notoriously hard to price, so maybe the deflators are just wrong. Goolsbee and Syverson went looking for exactly that and couldn't make it account for the decline. The cleanest test is physical — houses per worker, no prices involved. Across 1990–2020, single-family homes completed per employee fell from 2.63 to 2.35. Adjust for houses getting bigger and the most optimistic measure, square footage per worker, grows 0.5% a year — a quarter of the 2% the rest of the economy managed. Nor is it just us: of 29 OECD countries, 16 posted negative construction productivity growth between 1996 and 2019.

Had construction merely grown at 1% a year instead of shrinking, US labor productivity — and plausibly income per capita — would be about 10% higher today.

That counterfactual is theirs, not ours. Ten percent of everyone's income, forgone by one sector over fifty years. That is the difference between the country we have and the one we could have afforded to build.

Nobody has fully explained it

We'd rather be honest than sound certain: the economists who have studied this hardest do not have a single answer. Goolsbee and Syverson close by saying the struggle is real rather than a figment of the data, and that further research is needed to sort between competing explanations. Half a century, one of the largest sectors in the economy, and the mechanism is still genuinely contested. Anyone who tells you they've got it cleanly solved — us included — is selling something.

But one of their findings is the one we can't stop thinking about. In most industries the productive firms grow: they take share, they get copied, and their way of working spreads on its own. In construction that engine is broken. States with more productive construction sectors don't gain share of national activity — if anything, they lose it. Good practice doesn't propagate. Which means nothing about this fixes itself at the industry level, and nobody is coming to fix it for you.

What it looks like from inside

We can't settle a fifty-year economics debate, and we won't pretend a software subscription does. What we can tell you is what the loss looks like from inside a specialty contractor, because that's where we work.

A commercial job is thirty-odd companies who have never shared a system, and never will. The owner has one platform, the GC has another, the architect a third, and every specialty sub has a spreadsheet, a filing cabinet, and someone's memory. Nothing connects. So the same information gets typed over and over: the estimate re-keyed into a schedule of values, the SOV re-keyed into a pay app, the timecards re-keyed into certified payroll, the T&M tag re-keyed into a change order — if it survives the trip at all.

That cost lands hardest on the specialty contractor, because the sub is where the work physically happens and where the least tooling exists. A third of the day, gone to transcription. Whatever else is buried in the aggregate number, this part is real, it's visible from any jobsite trailer, and it's fixable. That's not a labor shortage. It's a labor leak — and unlike a shortage, you can fix a leak.

What we actually believe

People in the trades aren't the problem. They're the most under-tooled competent people in the American economy — a workforce that can put up a hospital in eighteen months, handed software a bank would laugh at.

And we think the collaboration problem and the paperwork problem are the same problem. The industry defaults to adversarial: contracts written to allocate blame, documentation kept mostly as ammunition, information held back because releasing it early costs you leverage later. The paperwork is defensive because the relationships are. Every hour spent proving you did the work is an hour not spent doing it.

The alternative isn't naivety about a hard business. It's confianza — the plain observation that people who trust each other build faster than people who don't, and that good tooling can make trust the cheaper option instead of the riskier one. When the record is accurate by default, you don't need ammunition.

How that shows up in the product

A philosophy that never touches a decision isn't one. Ours does, and the test is mutual benefit: if something is good for us and merely neutral for you, it doesn't ship.

  • Enter it once. The estimate becomes the SOV becomes the pay app. The timecards become the certified payroll. One continuous record, because that's the shape of the actual work.
  • Your data is yours. Exportable, always. We'd rather earn next month than trap you into it — lock-in is leverage, and leverage is the opposite of confianza.
  • We eat it first. STrOp runs live at a working California trade contractor before it runs anywhere else. The certified payroll it generates goes to DIR for real crews on real prevailing-wage jobs.
  • Priced for the shop that needs it most. The contractor with the thinnest back office has the most to gain and the least to spend. If only the big shops can afford the fix, the gap gets wider, not narrower.

What we're actually after

We started this by asking a fairly simple question: how do we help the most people do the best with their lives? Not the most users — the most people, doing the best.

Concretely, that's the PM who gets Friday night back. The owner who bids one more job this quarter because the last one closed itself out. The apprentice whose hours get logged right the first time. The family that moves in a season earlier because the drywall sub wasn't the bottleneck.

Fifty years of lost productivity isn't a law of nature. It's a set of habits and a tooling vacuum, and both are fixable — one shop at a time, from the inside, with the people doing the work. That's why we build this.

Productivity figures throughout are from Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson, The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector, Becker Friedman Institute Working Paper 2023-04 (University of Chicago, January 2023) — value added per worker, the housing-units-per-employee series, the OECD comparison, and the income-per-capita counterfactual. Earlier work in the same direction includes Paul Teicholz's construction labor productivity index and McKinsey's Improving construction productivity is the new imperative. Estimates vary by methodology, and the causes remain contested; the direction does not.