During five years spent working in the construction industry Paul Gilcreest often watched smaller contractors struggling to stay on top of all the different elements involved in a building project.
A plumber by training, who also has a degree in building engineering, Gilcreest’s real passion was for the management side of construction, and over time he had become increasingly interested in the positive impact that technology could have on construction projects. He knew that technology could go a long way towards solving the problems faced by the smaller contractors, but there was a hitch – the type of system they needed didn’t exist.
This prompted Gilcreest to come up with his own, and in 2021 he launched Trave, a modular digital project management toolkit aimed at small and medium sized construction companies.
“I had identified the pressing need for a more integrated and efficient approach to project management and this was only reinforced when I started doing consultancy work,” he says. “Everyone knows there’s a problem and after a while it became clear that the problems were common ones. And that rather than solving the problems for each client on an individual basis it would be far more effective to come up with a solution that everyone could use,” Gilcreest says.
“There are platforms on the market that cater for the needs of large-scale contractors who also often have teams of people in-house running different elements of the build. But there is nothing comparable that’s suitable for the smaller operators. The aim with Trave was to provide them with an alternative that is both easily accessed and cost-effective. The best way to describe Trave is as a bridge that links technology and construction for companies that want to transform the way they manage their projects and finances.
“We have taken a modular approach with the Trave solution so clients can choose the exact combination of features they want, meaning the product is highly adaptable and customisable for their specific requirements,” Gilcreest adds. “The toolkit includes modules for managing documents, labour, materials, health and safety and environmental compliance, and it can be used as a package or as standalone solutions. By centralising data capture and analytics within a single, user-friendly platform Trave will help streamline decision-making and reduce administrative workloads for construction companies.”
Trave operates on a SaaS basis with the subscription price based on user size and it works through a dashboard in the cloud that gives clients access to metrics about costs, time, safety, health, environment and quality all in one place. The solution is already live and in use with customers in Ireland, Britain and Australia.
“We have been getting excellent feedback from our early adopters for version one of the product and our plan is to keep the product evolving and to add more advanced features as time goes on. Secondly, as our customers data sets build up we plan to utilise this data to add multiple aspects of predictive analytics using machine learning tools,” Gilcreest says.
Trave now has a team of four, two on the commercial side and two on software development.
“I’ve been really lucky with my team and we’re a good mix of commercial, financial, technical and industry knowledge,” Gilcreest says. “We will keep the consultancy going because it continues to generate revenue and to complement the product side of the business but our main focus is on developing a market for the management platform which now accounts for around 75 per cent of what we do.”
Trave is based at the Cavan Digital Hub and investment to date in the bootstrapped start-up has been around €50,000 in hard cash (with support from Cavan LEO and Enterprise Ireland) and, “two years of my life in sweat equity”, Gilcreest says.
