“We have to fix this. We cannot do this again.”

That was Sr. Director of Preconstruction Mark Lundell’s reaction early in 2024 after watching a VP spend three painful weeks recreating an estimate from scratch for an audit. The issue? There was no system for tracking or retrieving historical cost decisions.

Parkway Construction had just begun using Join to help centralize preconstruction decisions and improve collaboration. But witnessing that VP’s struggle made something else clear to Lundell: that access to historical data was just as (or even more) critical.

That realization prompted a shift in strategy. Lundell and his team quickly doubled down on Join Benchmarking, tapping into a powerful archive of 1,500+ projects to drive more confident, faster decisions—and truly level up their preconstruction game.

Challenge

Parkway was built for speed, scale, and simplicity. For 40+ years, the Texas-based GC had successfully delivered thousands of projects—many straightforward, repeatable builds like restaurants and retail.

But in recent years, Parkway began taking on more complex, high-stakes projects, including temples for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which demanded a new level of detail and accountability during preconstruction.

Despite the shift in project type, Parkway’s systems hadn’t caught up. Cost data lived in Excel or in people’s heads. There was no standardized way to access past decisions or benchmark new ones. Preconstruction needed a full reset.

Solution

1. Phase One: Strengthening the Preconstruction Department by Onboarding Join 

Lundell was brought in to bolster the firm’s preconstruction department. Along with other key players at the company, he searched for tools that could centralize data, improve workflows, reduce risk, and offer owners visibility into the precon process.

After seeing a demo, the team selected Join—the leading collaborative preconstruction platform—for its transparency, decision-tracking, and ease of use. 

The first project out of the gate was for Pollo Campero, a fast-food chain with a new store prototype. “We wouldn’t normally use Join for a $2M restaurant,” Lundell says. “But being a prototype, and a prototype that gets replicated 100 times—if you make one small mistake 100 times, it becomes a big mistake.

We said, ‘Let’s get this right and make sure that the cost and all the decisions are really thought through and in depth so we can do this one time and do it really well for the owner.”

Early feedback was glowing. Says Preconstruction Manager Jake Bloom: “The owner loved it. And our design manager kept emailing everybody, including our senior architect, saying, ‘You guys have to see this new program that precon is using. It’s amazing.”

2. Turning Point: Discovering Join Benchmarking

While Join helped align project teams and increase team clarity, the game-changer was something unexpected: Benchmarking.

“Benchmarking was kind of an afterthought,” says Lundell. “But then it hit another initiative we’d created: to catalog data from a cost perspective.”

Benchmarking allowed the team to pull real cost data from over 1,500 past projects. It addressed their most painful bottleneck—accessing historical decisions—and helped them  create standardized systems for tracking valuable cost data and later putting it to good use.

3. The Pivot: Benchmarking Becomes Core to Precon Strategy

Once leadership saw Benchmarking in action—especially the VP who’d spent weeks digging through old estimates—it became clear: this wasn’t just a nice-to-have. It was essential.

That same VP backed the investment in Join across business units, helping catalyze firm-wide adoption. Benchmarking became Parkway’s “single source of truth” for estimating and cost guidance.

Impact

With Join Benchmarking, Parkway can now:

• Instantly tap into cost data across 1,500+ projects
• Support design and estimating decisions with real-time evidence
• Retain institutional knowledge even when staff turnover occurs
• Benchmark new projects against real, relevant history
  
  “With Join Benchmarking, we can repurpose company expertise—data, best practices, standards, lessons learned—in a way that’s visible and valuable,” says Bloom.

Preconstruction at Parkway is no longer just about getting to a number. It’s about using technology and historical intelligence to inform smarter, faster decisions—and positioning the firm to win and execute highly complex work with confidence.

To access Parkway's lessons learned and best practices for deploying Join Benchmarking, read the entire case study here