The training for submittals is getting yelled at

Let's go.

Elliot Christiansen is Sr. Vice President of Operations at Cleveland Construction, a national GC out of Mentor, Ohio. He came up as an assistant project manager and spent his first years on site, and he took ownership of the company's technology strategy from the operations chair rather than from an innovation seat.

On Construction Conversations in June, he described how the industry hands off one of its highest-stakes quality gates.

"Even when I came out of school, they put the most — as an industry, we put the most inexperienced people reviewing submittals. And I can remember in college, they're not telling you how to review submittals. You come out, you sit in the trailer, you're handed a couple thousand page spec book and handed some product data. No one wants to do it."

Notice where that sentence breaks. He starts on "they," which is the industry, somebody else, the way it's always been done. Then he stops and restarts on "as an industry, we." Same referent, different distance. He put himself in it without being asked to.

Then he named the training method.

"Training and onboarding around submittals just involves you getting yelled at."

That is how a person learns a document review process that decides whether the right product shows up on the job. No curriculum he can point to. No checklist. You find out you got it wrong when somebody raises their voice at you.

That costs you something specific if you sell into it.

Your content is addressed to a competent operator. Your reader isn't sure he's one. Copy written to streamline submittal review speaks to somebody who already knows how to review a submittal and wants to move faster. The person actually opening your page may be an assistant PM with a spec book he was handed, no instruction, and one piece of learned information about this task: that the feedback mechanism is somebody yelling. Those two readers need entirely different opening paragraphs, and the category writes almost exclusively for the first.

The pain lives in what nobody taught him. That's the part that travels past submittals. Most categories in construction software sit on top of a task somebody learned badly and under pressure. The first RFI you wrote and got sent back. The first schedule update in P6 that nobody walked you through. The first change order you had to price standing in front of an owner. Name the one in your category, write the piece that teaches it plainly, and you have a reader almost nobody is competing for.

There's a reason that content works and a feature page doesn't. Nobody is going to raise their hand in a project meeting and say they never learned how to do this. They're going to look it up privately, which means the company that published the plain explanation gets to be in the room for the most honest moment your buyer has all week. That is a considerably better position than being the sixth logo in a comparison chart.

Ask three of your customers this question, in these words: what part of your job did nobody ever teach you?

Asking what's hard gets you a feature request. Asking what they were never taught gets you the trailer, the spec book, and the person raising their voice.

Then write that piece. Teach the task all the way through, at the level of somebody doing it for the first time, and leave your product out of it entirely.

The thing the industry never bothered to teach is sitting there in every category, unwritten, because it doesn't look like marketing. It's the only content your buyer would be embarrassed to be caught reading, which is exactly why he'll read it.

This issue draws on Elliot Christiansen's appearance on Episode 053 of Construction Conversations, "The Best Construction Tech Rarely Wins. Here's What Does." hosted by Stephen Poppe and Lars Herman, published June 30, 2026.

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