Phoenix Build Expo 2026 | Keynotes & Seminars

Your P&L says you made money last year. Your bank account says something different. That gap — between what you earned on paper and what actually sits in the bank — is the single most common problem in construction, and it has nothing to do with how hard you're working or how many jobs you're closing. Using real, live examples from real contracting businesses, this keynote lays out exactly why profitable companies run out of cash, and the specific playbook to fix it — without buying another piece of software, without raising your prices, and without taking on debt to bridge the gap. This isn't theory. It's the exact framework being used inside contracting businesses right now to turn "profitable on paper" into cash you can actually see.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the specific point in your business where profit is quietly leaking out between the job and the bank account.
2. Learn the account structure that separates true profit from operating cash — so you always know what's actually yours to spend.
3. See a live, real-numbers example of a contractor who fixed this exact problem without raising a single price.
4. Leave with the first two moves to make this week to start closing your own cash flow gap.

Most businesses approach government contracting by searching for posted solicitations and responding to bids. However, successful government contractors understand that the procurement process begins long before an opportunity is publicly released. Agency missions, budgets, market research, acquisition strategies, and stakeholder collaboration all influence purchasing decisions well in advance of a Request for Proposal.

This session provides a practical framework for understanding the government acquisition process from the agency's perspective. Attendees will learn how requirements are developed, who influences buying decisions, why market research and early engagement matter, and how to identify opportunities before they reach the bidding stage. The presentation also explores the growing role of artificial intelligence in market research, opportunity identification, and proposal development, while emphasizing the continued importance of relationships, trust, and strategic positioning.

Whether you're a contractor, architect, engineer, manufacturer, construction professional, or business owner looking to expand into the public sector, you'll leave with a clearer understanding of how government agencies make purchasing decisions and practical strategies to position your business for long-term success in the government marketplace.

Customers often focus on the lowest bid they receive. Contractors spend more time getting as low a number as possible as opposed to making a good profit on projects. Contractors are capable of winning work but struggle in securing a reasonable profit on their projects. The result is focusing on bidding and quoting as opposed to full customer engagement to drive higher profits. There are very effective methods to increase margins within a solid sales effort. These methods will be presented and examples of their success related. Contractors and suppliers alike will benefit from this detailed information.

In this class we will layout how to determine what associations to join, how to work them and get business from your involvement. The single greatest way to find grouped customers and network contacts is right in your backyard association! Work them to the fullest and you'll never make a cold call again!

https://www.tomwoodcocksealthedeal.com

Discover how to use ChatGPT effectively to reduce marketing costs and generate better leads. Learn the prompts that improve AI visibility, strengthen your website’s credibility, eliminate ineffective marketing messages, and identify hidden opportunities using Search Console. Leave with practical strategies you can implement immediately to attract more qualified customers.

Course Outline

• Why most companies collect data but never use it
 • Turning business data into actionable insights
 • Using AI to improve accountability and performance
 • Coaching technicians and teams with real time feedback
 • Building dashboards that drive action
 • Creating a data driven culture

Learning Outcomes

Attendees will learn how AI can help leaders make faster, better decisions while improving team performance.

This class will provide contractors with a practical understanding of how insurance companies assess construction firms, determine pricing, and evaluate risk. Attendees will learn how underwriters view:

Claims frequency and severity

Safety culture and operational discipline

Financial stability and growth trends

Management quality and leadership

Subcontractor risk transfer

Fleet and driver exposures

Jobsite controls and documentation

Contract language and insurance requirements

The session will also cover practical steps contractors can take to improve their insurance profile, strengthen carrier relationships, reduce long-term insurance costs, and position their companies for growth.

Designed specifically for general contractors and specialty trades, this presentation translates the insurance

Cost estimating is one of the most important tasks for any contractor, as these estimates represent a prediction of a future occurrence with so many uncertainties. Being too conservative will reduce the chance of winning a contract, while being too liberal will reduce profitability and may even lead to a loss. Failing to pay attention to certain items can make a big difference in the estimate accuracy.

While no one is perfect, the contractor can follow a few tips to optimize the estimate; minimizing risks and uncertainties and maximizing profit. This seminar takes a chronological tour from project inception to completion, providing valuable tips that tend to reduce risks and uncertainties and draw the contractor’s attention to issues that optimize the estimate and maximize profit.

How to use federal programs to fast-track your revenue and legally bypass the bidding wars

Want to stop fighting over low-margin local bids and break into high-paying federal construction contracts? The U.S. Federal Government is the world's largest buyer of construction services, and by law, billions of dollars are locked away exclusively for firms utilizing specific federal programs.

If you aren’t aggressively leveraging certifications like 8(a), HUBZone, WOSB, and VOSB, you are leaving massive, guaranteed revenue on the table for your competitors. Even better—programs like Joint Ventures and the SBA Mentor-Protégé agreement allow you to team up with larger contractors to win massive federal projects you couldn't qualify for alone.

In this high-impact session, we strip away the complex government bureaucracy and give you the exact roadmap to position your construction firm for elite federal status.

What you will learn:

• The Big Three Catalysts: How to get positioned on the GSA Schedule, capture emergency FEMA funding, and leverage the 8(a) program for sole-source (no-bid) contracts.
• The Teaming Secret Weapon: How to legally use Joint Ventures and the Mentor-Protégé program to bid on massive federal projects using a larger partner's past performance.
• The Target Demographics: How to stack HUBZone, Veteran-Owned (VOSB), and Women-Owned (WOSB) status to eliminate 95% of your competition.
• The Fatal Compliance Trap: The #1 reason construction firms lose their federal certifications mid-project—and how to bulletproof your business against audit failures.

Stop guessing at government paperwork. Come learn the step-by-step framework to unlock a steady stream of highly profitable, recession-proof federal work.

Everyone wants to LEAD. Few understand the secret: powerful leaders know when to speak—and when to stay silent. In this dynamic class, Dr. Jacob Hawk reveals how saying less can strengthen your influence, sharpen your impact, and elevate your leadership. Discover the art of leading more by saying less.

It is paramount that contractors realize that the most important aspect of their business is sales. Without them you have nothing. Yet, the amount of attention given to sales by most contractors is minimal. This results in low profits and the ups and downs of revenue. It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is or how efficiently you run your business if you’re not closing deals. We’ll get you closing more projects at higher profits.

 You don't need to be technical. You don't need another piece of software you'll abandon in a month. What you need is something that acts like a second brain — a built-in assistant that takes the repeatable, energy-draining work off your plate so you can get back to running the business instead of being buried inside it. In this live, hands-on workshop, we'll build a real AI-powered delegation system in front of you — no scripts, no fluff, just a working tool you can start using the moment you walk out the door. This isn't about chasing every new AI trend. It's about turning AI into the one thing most contractor owners have never had: a system that remembers, reminds, and executes so you don't have to carry it all in your head.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the three categories of repeatable owner-level tasks in your business that are safe to delegate to an AI assistant today — and the ones that are not.
2. Build a working AI delegation prompt live in the room, using your own business as the example, that you can put to use the same day.
3. Learn the difference between an AI tool and an AI system — and why only one of them actually gives you hours back.
4. Leave with a specific, written plan for the first 8 hours per week you will reclaim, and what you will do with that time instead.

Most contractors don’t have a bookkeeping problem — they have a transparency problem. Thinking they can skip investing in the accuracy of their numbers leads to thousands upon thousands of lost dollars and sometimes, the demise of the business altogether. Accurate numbers tell a story: which jobs are actually profitable, where cash is quietly leaking, and whether the business can survive its next growth spurt. Most owners just aren’t set up to hear it, because "good enough" books were never built to talk back. This session is not a bookkeeping tutorial. It's a live demonstration of how a P&L can look completely correct, and still be wrong. Attendees leave with a clear picture of what their financials should look like and be telling them, why the consequences of ignoring that story is often invisible until they’re expensive, and what it actually looks like to run a contracting business that makes decisions from real numbers instead of gut feelings.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

Read their own P&L the way their business actually needs it read — and identify the financial blind spots specific to job-costed, contract-based businesses, not generic small-business bookkeeping advice.
Recognize the early warning signs that their books are hiding a problem instead of revealing one.
Understand the real, often-delayed cost of poor financial visibility.
Walk away with a short list of questions their financials should be able to answer today — and know within minutes whether theirs can.

How to put AI to work in your business this week. The mindset shift (treat it like an employee, not a search bar), how to set up a workspace with roles and your real company docs, a simple prompt framework, and two starter plays: reviewing sub bids in 90 seconds and drafting a scope of work in two minutes. Everyone leaves with something they can run Monday.

Course outline:

1. Mapping the end-to-end customer journey to eliminate bottlenecks

2. Implementing standardized digital workflows for scheduling, budgeting, and change orders

3. Turning project data into marketing assets that generate referrals and new leads

4. Action-ready tools and templates attendees can deploy immediately

Everyone wants to be the best in their field, but becoming the GOAT requires more than technical skill. The difference-maker? Skills most companies don’t know how to hire for. In this class, Dr. Jacob Hawk reveals how to stand out, rise above the competition, and become unforgettable in any industry.

Building and sustaining a safety culture is a practical, leadership-focused session designed for business owners, executives, and safety professionals who want measurable results, not just policies on paper. This course breaks down the core elements of an effective safety culture, including leadership accountability, employee engagement, hazard recognition systems, behavioral reinforcement, and regulatory alignment. Attendees will learn how to move from reactive compliance to proactive risk management, reduce incidents rates, strengthen morale, and protect their organization from operational and legal exposure. This session includes real world examples and actionable strategies participants can implement immediately.

Learn how to fix the two biggest marketing leaks costing contractors revenue: poor website engagement and slow lead follow-up. Discover how AI can improve website performance, automate personalized responses, re-engage lost prospects, and increase close rates. Build a smarter marketing system that converts more leads without increasing your advertising budget.

• Why most contractors lose 80% of potential reviews
 • The hidden connection between reviews and revenue growth
 • How to capture reviews while the technician is still on site
 • Building a referral engine from every completed job
 • Measuring ROI from reviews and reputation management
 • Creating a repeatable system that scales across every technician

Learning Outcomes

Attendees will leave with a framework to increase review volume, improve online reputation, generate more referrals, and reduce reliance on paid advertising.

An introductory class explaining "no-bid" pathways in federal contracting, with definitions, eligibility, where they appear, and compliance basics. Participants will learn how relationships and market research factor in, and where to find authoritative rules and examples to capture government contracts.

Most contractors don’t have a bookkeeping problem — they have a transparency problem. Thinking they can skip investing in the accuracy of their numbers leads to thousands upon thousands of lost dollars and sometimes, the demise of the business altogether. Accurate numbers tell a story: which jobs are actually profitable, where cash is quietly leaking, and whether the business can survive its next growth spurt. Most owners just aren’t set up to hear it, because "good enough" books were never built to talk back. This session is not a bookkeeping tutorial. It's a live demonstration of how a P&L can look completely correct, and still be wrong. Attendees leave with a clear picture of what their financials should look like and be telling them, why the consequences of ignoring that story is often invisible until they’re expensive, and what it actually looks like to run a contracting business that makes decisions from real numbers instead of gut feelings.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

Read their own P&L the way their business actually needs it read — and identify the financial blind spots specific to job-costed, contract-based businesses, not generic small-business bookkeeping advice.
Recognize the early warning signs that their books are hiding a problem instead of revealing one.
Understand the real, often-delayed cost of poor financial visibility.
Walk away with a short list of questions their financials should be able to answer today — and know within minutes whether theirs can.

In this energizing speech, leadership expert and author Janet Polach, Ph.D. reveals how leaders can break free from the trap of constant busy-ness and lead with a strategic mindset as well as greater clarity, focus, and trust.Leveraging her proven strategic leadership model, Janet introduces the seven essential mindsets of expert leaders and the habits that drive sustainable results. The audience will gain practical tools they can use immediately to sharpen decision-making, foster trust with their teams, and shift from reactive execution to strategic impact — transforming overload into alignment and performance that lasts.

Learn how to build a marketing system that consistently generates qualified leads. Discover the five channels every contractor should understand—Google Ads, Meta, retargeting, SEO, and AI search optimization—and how each supports business growth. Gain practical strategies for allocating your marketing budget, improving ROI, and creating a predictable pipeline of new opportunities.

The next level. How to set up AI agents that run on their own every morning (overnight bid intake, job-cost rollups), and the big one — building a single, always-current cost catalog from the invoices and bids you already have. This is where AI stops being a novelty and starts protecting margin.

A candid, practitioner-led panel on real-world AI in construction and government contracting: what's changing in workflows, compliance, bidding, and client expectations. Leaders share wins, stumbles, and practical guardrails so small and midsized firms can evaluate where AI fits-today and in the next 12 months.

Good marketing is meaningless if you don’t know how to close leads. Contractors spend significant dollars on marketing to produce leads. It’s necessary to use all the vehicles in regard to social media, A.I., web and e-newsletter marketing to gain leads. We’ll teach you how to raise your close rate and improve your ROI on that marketing investment. Marketing is NOT sales but can effectively lead to sales if leads are worked properly. Find out how.

"QuickBooks doesn’t work." "It never gives me the right numbers." We hear some version of this constantly, and it’s almost never true. QuickBooks Online can do everything a contractor needs: job costing, payroll allocation, work-in-progress tracking, all of it. The software isn’t the problem. The problem is what got put into it, by someone who didn’t know what "correctly" looked like. This session is the natural next step after "The Story Your Numbers Are Telling You." Where that session showed what the numbers reveal once they’re right, this one shows why so many contractors’ numbers never get there in the first place — and exactly what to check in your own file before you blame the software.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

Explain why "the software is wrong" is almost always a data-entry problem in disguise — and why that’s actually good news, because data entry is fixable.
Recognize the specific, common breakdowns that quietly wreck job costing in QuickBooks: jobs tagged as customers, income counted twice, payroll that never lands on a job, and bills that go
missing until they’re paid.
Walk away knowing what to ask the person doing their books — whether that’s themselves, an employee, or Devine Consulting.

Contractor schedules shape project planning, cash flow, procurement, and resource management—but CPM schedules often rely on assumptions that can create risk. This session offers practical tips for building and maintaining accurate, optimized schedules from day one through execution. Learn how to strengthen forecasting, improve reliability, and use your schedule as a powerful tool for project control and performance.

Every contractor owner is being told they're falling behind if they're not "using AI." Much of it is not true, and most of it is a distraction from the real problem. In this live workshop, we cut through the hype and show you the truth: most contracting businesses don't have an AI problem — they have a system problem, and AI without a system just makes chaos move faster. Using a live demo, we'll show you exactly where AI does and doesn't belong in a contracting business, and how to build the system underneath it first, so that when you do use AI, it actually works.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the difference between a business problem AI can solve and a business problem only a system can solve.
2. See a live demo of AI layered on top of an existing business system — and understand why it fails without that system in place.
3. Learn the specific, narrow list of tasks where AI creates real time savings for a contractor owner today.
4. Leave with a one-page plan for what to build first — system or AI tool — based on where your business actually stands.

"QuickBooks doesn’t work." "It never gives me the right numbers." We hear some version of this constantly, and it’s almost never true. QuickBooks Online can do everything a contractor needs: job costing, payroll allocation, work-in-progress tracking, all of it. The software isn’t the problem. The problem is what got put into it, by someone who didn’t know what "correctly" looked like. This session is the natural next step after "The Story Your Numbers Are Telling You." Where that session showed what the numbers reveal once they’re right, this one shows why so many contractors’ numbers never get there in the first place — and exactly what to check in your own file before you blame the software.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

Explain why "the software is wrong" is almost always a data-entry problem in disguise — and why that’s actually good news, because data entry is fixable.
Recognize the specific, common breakdowns that quietly wreck job costing in QuickBooks: jobs tagged as customers, income counted twice, payroll that never lands on a job, and bills that go
missing until they’re paid.
Walk away knowing what to ask the person doing their books — whether that’s themselves, an employee, or Devine Consulting.

This class will provide insight into how safety is more than compliance.  It is a strategic business investment that directly impacts an organization’s performance, profitability, and long-term success.  This class explores how effective safety leadership creates a measurable value by reducing risk, preventing costly incidents, improving employee engagement, and strengthening operation excellence.

 Participants will learn how safety professionals contribute to the bottom line by identifying hazards before they become losses, using data decision-making, improving workplace culture, and partnerships with leadership to achieve business objectives.  The course will examine true costs of workplace incidents, the financial impact of proactive safety programs, and how organization can demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of safety initiatives.

The class is designed for business leaders, operations managers, HR professionals, and safety practitioners.  This session provides practical strategies for transforming safety from a perceived expense into a competitive advantage.