The person behind the computer
In this industry, you don’t hire a company. You hire the person who shows up. So here’s who shows up.
I’m Connor Goulding. Goldsmith Growth is me: one operator, because that’s the way I like it. No account managers between you and the person doing the work and no junior staff learning on your dime.
How I got here
I’ve spent about a decade building systems for businesses by doing one thing consistently: talking to the people closest to the work before building anything. That started in 2016 as a freelancer running ads and automations, grew into my own agency (Goldsmith Marketing, 2018), and expanded through a partnership at a branding and content agency (Journi, 2019). Along the way I’ve worked with cosmetic surgeons, lawyers, lenders, and real estate teams: from boutique luxury shops to a 1,400-agent brokerage.
Construction pulled me in because the friction was the worst I’d seen and the people were the most honest about it. A VP of Operations at a Seattle-area GC asked me, in my first conversation, “How in the hell can I eliminate some keyboard strokes?” I spent months embedded in his team’s workflows and built the automation layer that became the case study →: 70% faster document processing, measured on 3,500+ real documents from a $50M project.
How I work
The method has a name I use half-jokingly: interview-first. It means the project starts with your people, not my assumptions.
Extract the tribal knowledge
I interview the people closest to the pain and map the workflow they actually run, not the one in the SOP binder.
Codify it
Separate the decisions that need human judgment from the busywork that crept in around them.
Automate underneath the existing tools
No new software, no new logins. Procore stays Procore. A human approves every output.
Stick around
Most automation fails after launch, not before it. The job includes showing the crew how it fits and staying until the new habit beats the old one.
That fourth step is the whole difference. Most AI projects in construction fail because nobody did the unglamorous integration work. The boring part is my entire job.
Most solutions fail before they ship.
“The right solution, built around the wrong workflow, is the wrong solution.”
It was supposed to make your life easier. Instead, it made things more complicated and created more work for your team.
They delivered a 200-slide deck. What you actually needed was someone to build the system, not just describe the problem.
The wrong solution means you pay twice: once for what didn’t work, and again for what should have been built the first time.
The problem with specialists
Your PMs use Procore. Accounting uses Viewpoint. Your supers text screenshots of daily reports. Three systems, one project, and your people are the bridge between all of them.
You don’t need another niche tool. You need someone who can see across the entire operation: someone who understands the PM’s day well enough to talk to them honestly, and technical enough to build the connection.
That’s what a decade of working across industries teaches you: Pattern recognition.
Off the clock
I live in Portland with my wife, Sara, and my dog, Cooper.
I spent a stint at Amazon building VR experiences, which is either the most or least relevant thing on this page depending on how you look at it.
When I’m not digging around in Procore, I’m usually playing guitar, getting busy in the kitchen, or going on hikes around the PNW. If we end up working together, you’ll find out I approach a workflow map the same way I approach anything: I take it apart, find the pattern, rebuild it cleaner.
If any of this sounds like your kind of person
The first call is 20 minutes and it’s a conversation.