About Brinkman Construction (BCI)

Brinkman Construction is a 100% employee-owned general contractor headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, with a second office in the Denver Metro Area. Founded in 2005, the company became an independent, employee-owned firm in 2016 and has since grown into one of the Front Range’s most respected builders.

Brinkman Construction focuses primarily on private development—today largely multifamily construction—serving clients from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Colorado Springs. With roughly notable clients including New Belgium Brewing and Otterbox, Brinkman Construction operates a project management team of 25–30 PMs running complex, high-value jobs simultaneously.

Brinkman Construction was also Agave's very first construction customer, and has been with Agave ever since.

The Challenge: Financials Stuck in Spreadsheets

Before Agave, Brinkman Construction struggled with a fundamental problem: financial data lived in too many places, and moving it between them was slow, error-prone, and deeply manual.

The process looked something like this: project managers would export cost data from their PM system, pull it into Excel, apply formulas and manual transformations, and then re-import the results into CMiC, their ERP. It was a multi-day exercise every month.

“The process required manually moving data back and forth, and through that it just became very hard to manage our financials in a predictable, straightforward way.”

Tim Kelleher

Standards and Innovation Manager, Brinkman

The downstream effects were significant. Financial snapshots were stale.Any issue with any part of the financial management system or the processes would pause all data ingestion into the financial management system entirely, grinding visibility to a halt.

Brinkman Construction knew they needed an integration that could keep their accounting system and project management system in sync, accurately and automatically. What they didn’t yet know was how transformative that integration would become.

Choosing Agave

Brinkman Construction was introduced to Agave through the team at CMiC, who knew the company was searching for an integration solution. At the time, Agave didn't yet have an ERP Sync integration built for CMiC.

Building a reliable CMiC integration from scratch meant grappling with a ton of system complexity. CMiC is a powerful, highly configurable ERP, and getting data to flow correctly required deeply understanding how cost data is structured, how jobs and cost codes behave, and where the edge cases live that cause syncs to break in production.

The Agave team spent months working closely with Brinkman Construction to do exactly that — learning the platform, stress-testing the sync, and iterating until the integration was production-ready. Brinkman Construction was a collaborative partner in building something that would eventually serve CMiC contractors across the industry.

The Results on Forecasting and Visibility

That time investment paid off quickly — for Brinkman Construction, the results were transformative: faster forecasting, real-time financial visibility, and a fundamentally different way of running their business.

Forecasting twice as fast—with a fraction of the labor

The most immediate impact was speed. Brinkman Construction's monthly forecasting process, previously a multi-day ordeal conducted in CMiC, is now done in Autodesk Construction Cloud—and it runs twice as fast. More importantly, the labor required has dropped dramatically.

“[Before Agave] it took days of work. And now it’s hours. We’re doing it with a quarter of the labor on average.”

Tim Kelleher

Standards and Innovation Manager, Brinkman

Across Brinkman Construction's 25–30 project managers, that translates to roughly one to two days saved per PM, per month.

From monthly snapshots to hourly visibility

Perhaps the most striking change is the cadence of financial visibility. Before Agave, Brinkman Construction got a snapshot of project financials once a month—and a deeper review only every few months. Today, financial data refreshes hourly, flowing automatically from CMiC through Agave into Autodesk and then into Power BI.

That shift from monthly to hourly has changed what’s possible operationally. Teams can identify financial risks on a project as they emerge—not weeks later when it’s harder to course-correct.

Change order management: from months to weeks

One of the most tangible operational improvements has been in change management. In the old process, change orders followed a slow and costly sequence: a design change would come in, work would get done, pricing would get figured out, and only then would recovery begin—often months after the original scope shift.

Now, when a change occurs, it’s documented immediately and already in the system. Brinkman Construction can get pricing in front of the client before the work begins, not after. The window from change event to resolution has collapsed from months to weeks.

The benefits extend beyond cash flow. Better change visibility has improved reimbursability on owner-driven changes that used to slip through. And it’s given clients a clearer forward-looking view of how design decisions will affect their budgets—improving the overall owner experience and Brinkman Construction's relationships with repeat clients.

Faster PM onboarding—and significant ERP savings on the horizon

With Agave in place, new project managers no longer need to learn CMiC—they simply log into Autodesk, where all the ERP data is already pre-loaded and ready to use. CMiC has effectively become an abstraction layer for the accounting team, invisible to PMs in the field.

The result: PM onboarding time has been cut by roughly 50%, dropping from 12–18 months to around 6. Brinkman Construction has also already reduced CMiC license costs by moving PMs off the platform.

Looking Ahead

Brinkman Construction was Agave's first construction customer—and what started as a leap of faith has become something neither side fully anticipated. When Agave proposed an untested CMiC integration with an unconventional commercial model, Brinkman Construction said yes. That bet has paid dividends across their financial operations, and the team is now exploring how Agave can extend even further into their workflows.

Today, Agave is woven into the fabric of how Brinkman Constructiondelivers work. It's the system that moves cost data from CMiC into Autodesk hourly, keeps project managers ahead of budget risks, and gives leadership the visibility to act before problems compound. What began as a fix for a manual data problem has quietly become one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the business.

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