ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Construction has more bankruptcies than any other sector. Almost none of them are about bad building.
Guy Saxelby is the co-founder and CEO of Earlytrade, a marketplace that lets subcontractors get paid early on invoices that have already been approved. The sub names a discount, the general contractor pays out of its own idle cash and earns a return on money that was sitting in a money market fund, and no lender sits in the middle. He started the company in Sydney in 2018 after late payments in one of his own businesses cost him employees, went all in on construction in 2023, and moved his family to Denver to build the US business.
The arithmetic underneath it is the part that stayed with me. A subcontractor pays their crew every seven to fourteen days. They buy materials sixty days before the project starts. They do the work. Then they wait sixty to ninety days for the invoice. Who's funding that?
We get into:
- Why construction has more bankruptcies than any other sector, and why they're almost all cash flow
- Pay-when-paid, and why "risk falls down the hill" from owner to GC to sub
- How the marketplace actually works, and why it isn't factoring
- Why the subs using it most are the ones growing, not the ones failing
- Why a good general contractor says no to more work than it takes on
- What's different about the US market: no regulated payment terms, and a private sector that dominates
- Why the big ERPs haven't simply built this themselves
- Breaking in as an outsider: "Who are you? You're a foreigner, and you're not from construction"
- Fifty-one sets of state rules, and why changing construction's legal plumbing is a fool's errand
- Designing something non-invasive: a financial benefit without being a financial product
- Where private equity actually makes its money in construction, and why it's rarer than people assume
- AI agents as a growth play rather than an efficiency play
- Ten years out: robotics, and the data-portability problem that matters more
Links: Earlytrade - https://earlytrade.com | Guy Saxelby on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/guy-saxelby/
00:00 Show kickoff
00:24 Meet Guy Saxelby
03:19 What Earlytrade is, and how it started in Sydney
04:53 How COVID pulled the company into construction
06:02 Why Denver
08:01 Australia versus the US on payment terms
10:43 Construction supply chains are starving
11:16 Risk falls down the hill
12:15 Pay when paid
13:36 How the marketplace actually works
14:56 Dynamic discounting versus a fixed rate
16:42 Selling to the GC, serving the sub
17:13 The pitch to a general contractor
18:21 Is it only for desperate subs?
19:26 The sub's cash cycle
21:01 Why good GCs say no to work
21:53 The ideal customer profile
26:00 Sitting on top of the ERP
27:41 Objections and misconceptions
30:26 Why the ERPs haven't copied it
34:50 "Who are you? You're a foreigner"
38:18 Change the system or design around it
39:44 Fifty-one sets of rules and a fool's errand
44:33 Private equity in construction 4
6:59 The $10M wall and venture in contech
50:54 AI at EarlyTrade
55:04 Ten years out
58:11 The ten-year vision for Earlytrade
59:57 Who Guy wants to hear from
1:00:47 Scared money don't make money
BuiltForward
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Hosted by Jason Jacobs.
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