Read this article in French German Italian Portuguese Spanish
Establishing a base: Exclusive Q&A with SubBase founder Eric Helitzer
11 February 2025
Eric Helitzer grew up in construction and building, and he spent his first decade as a professional as a project engineer and project manager for two Florida, US-based construction companies. After more than ten years managing work and sites, he said he discovered ample room for improvement across the industry, and he founded SubBase to help fill those gaps.
SubBase co-founder and CEO Eric Helitzer, on right. (Image: SubBase)
SubBase is a platform used to streamline construction material management for subcontractors and self-performing general contractors, specifically the upstream and downstream communications around supply chain and materials acquisition.
鈥淚t replaces the chaotic mix of emails, texts, and spreadsheets with a single, user-friendly platform across all stakeholders,鈥� SubBase said.
Recently, SubBase launched its Ready-Mix Concrete Commitments tool, which allows contractors to schedule, plan, and manage concrete material needs through a centralised workflow.
Construction Briefing caught up with Helitzer at the 2025 World of Concrete expo, and he discussed the specificity of SubBase (launched in 2022) and how he sees its future in the modernising construction environment.
Can you provide a brief background for yourself; how did you get involved in construction and what led to founding SubBase?
My background is in construction management.
Eric Helitzer, SubBase
I studied at the University of Florida, and came from a third generation of builders, so grandfather, father were in the construction management space for years.
After graduating college, I started working at a very large concrete sub-contractor in Miami. This is at the time the tail end of the condo boom. So, I was very involved in the pre-construction and operations aspect of new construction, high-rise construction, but specifically for subs on the shell side.
Then, I went into the GC [general contractor] side in 2014 because of a need for someone to implement new technology in the form of Procore. They were looking to roll it out in 2014.
At the time, software was not really relevant, or at least it wasn鈥檛 really around, and we baked it into workflows on projects that were new.
Then from 2014 till 2022, I spent that time at on the GC front, and then the tail end of Covid is when I was connected to a technical advisor who wanted to jump in with me on the construction materials front because there was a big gap post-Covid between subcontractors and material suppliers, specifically on pricing fluctuations.
In general, I wanted more visibility into my spend; as we started building with a local subcontractor in the market, I figured out that there was a lot more pain upstream in the accounting and budgeting that piece of the workflow, [and] most people don鈥檛 see from the field.
So, we started building SubBase out of the company where I was working; really focused on dialling in the very manual workflows of subcontractors and all the material suppliers, and then, internally, for subcontractors providing visibility from the field to the office into accounting.
What is different about a conventional subcontractor management process compared to using SubBase?
Most people today are managing this very manual, [data sheets], emails, [cloud servers], texts, you name it.
They鈥檙e trying to get their materials organised in that fashion, [but what SubBase does is] we take that all in, but built specifically for the trades and how the workflow moves.
[Users] can tie their field in with material databases, update their pricing in real time for vendors, track delivery tickets, they can track invoice reconciliation paired back to orders, and then, ultimately, all that data feeds into their accounting systems to update their budgets.
So, it鈥檚 a very manual process today. There鈥檚 really not much organization.
We take that under one umbrella.
Something unique about SubBase by design is that it鈥檚 not necessarily a platform to help GCs get more work, but instead be more efficient with their existing contracts, is the right?
Right. And you鈥檝e got, quite frankly, a younger generation, but a lack of people that companies are looking to hire as they鈥檙e expanding and growing. All of our companies that we work with have filled backlogs. It鈥檚 not like they鈥檙e looking for work, some of them are packed through 2026.
[So those companies] need to be able to find the people to be able to support the growth, and they are leaning on technologies in certain ways.
An example is one SubBase user could grow from 20 million to 50 million in [revenue] in the span of one to two years. With SubBase, they don鈥檛 have to hire the headcount internally to keep up with the demand of all the paperwork that鈥檚 going to come with that. We鈥檙e starting to see companies that are growing start to institute processes. They鈥檙e starting to centralise purchasing because that touches their profit and loss statement and the data, which was never really structured before. It can start to be structured now because of technology, and that鈥檚 what we鈥檙e seeing today.
What鈥檚 next for SubBase and its customers?
Our aim is to partner with companies that are looking to benefit themselves.
On the GC side is, they want their subs to be using the technology that they鈥檙e using. The material workflow is much more complex than managing an RFI [request for information].
[Also], subcontractors are not really educated because they don鈥檛 know that these solutions exist, and they also don鈥檛 understand the problems that they鈥檝e been facing; they may think [their process] is not broken until we show them the cost that it takes to manage this type of aspect. Generally speaking, they show up to work, they do their job, because they鈥檝e been doing it for 30 years. That鈥檚 what they do.
But they don鈥檛 see the data and the numbers of how much they could be saving, how much time they could be saving. So, part of what we do is education.
The change that we鈥檙e seeing is getting the top decision makers of companies to have that buy-in upfront. Because, a lot of times, they鈥檙e very much removed from the day to day, but it does affect the way that their company operates, so that culture change is something that we鈥檙e seeing, but we want to see a lot more of it in the future.
We got a lot coming out by trade. We鈥檙e focusing on some of the biggest trades: concrete, mechanical, plumbing, but really tailoring the platform to be very flexible to go into those different verticals because each vertical procures differently.
And that鈥檚 the key is making a simple interface that takes a complex workflow, which is materials, and really hone into the simplicity, which is what we鈥檙e doing, and leveraging the power of the data, giving that to the user, which is ultimately where companies are finding the biggest benefit that we didn鈥檛 have before.
必赢体育
STAY CONNECTED
Receive the information you need when you need it through our world-leading magazines, newsletters and daily briefings.
CONNECT WITH THE TEAM
