I built these systems
from the inside.

I spent years as a Director of Business Development in commercial construction. I was good at relationships. I was not good at keeping up with the admin around them.

Events I missed because nobody was tracking them. Follow-ups I intended to send and never did. Proposals that snuck up on me. A CRM that the whole team agreed to use and nobody touched after month two.

And the worst part — projects we lost because we found out too late. By the time a project hit our radar, three other firms had already been in conversations with the owner for months. We were competing for work that was already decided.

So I started building systems. A spreadsheet that tracked events. A process for logging every networking interaction. A template library for follow-up messages. A dashboard that showed the real pipeline without me having to chase anyone for updates.

It worked. Not perfectly — nothing manual works perfectly — but enough that I could see what was possible if the right automation was underneath it.

When I stepped away from my role, I had a clear picture of two things: every BD team in AEC has this exact problem, and almost none of them have the system to fix it. Not because the problem is hard, but because nobody has built the right thing for this specific world.

I built Upstream BD to fix that. Not to sell software — to build the system, implement it in your firm, and make sure it actually runs. The relationships are yours. The admin is mine.