Miter Co-Founder Tobin Paxton on the Voices of CFMA Podcast

Labor Shortages, Data Gaps, and the Future of Construction Finance.

At Miter, we believe construction companies deserve software built around the real problems they face every day, and that belief is exactly what Miter co-founder Tobin Paxton sat down to discuss on the March 2026 episode of the Voices of CFMA podcast.

As CFMA’s newest Elite Partner, Miter shares a mission that runs parallel to CFMA’s own: advancing the construction industry through smarter tools, better data, and stronger teams. 

In this conversation, Tobin traces the origin story of Miter from a Thanksgiving payroll lightbulb moment to spending weeks on-site with Bay Area contractors, and explains why the labor shortage and data backbone challenges facing construction finance teams sit at the core of everything Miter builds. 

Whether you’re a CFO tired of chasing data across disconnected systems or a controller buried in manual certified payroll reports, this episode speaks directly to why CFMA and Miter are partnering to empower construction finance leaders.

Podcast Transcript

Sal Marino: Hello everyone and welcome to the March 2026 episode of Voices of CFMA, sponsored by Premier Construction Software. I’m Sal Marino and today I’m joined by Tobin Paxton, co-founder of Miter and a leader helping construction companies think differently about how they operate. Miter is CFMA’s newest elite partner, so this conversation is a great opportunity to learn more about Tobin, the company he helped build, and the challenges and opportunities he’s seen across the construction industry. Tobin, thank you for joining me. Let’s start off, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Miter?

Tobin Paxton: First of all, just stoked to be here. A big fan of this podcast and I feel like I’m meeting a friend already just based on my listening hours.

I’m part of the founding team of Miter, which means I’ve done a lot over the past six or seven years. I started implementing customers, I personally implemented 200 of our customers and really learned the nuts and bolts of how to take a customer live on a software product. Today, I spend a lot of my time in pre-sales: growth, marketing, sales, and working with organizations like CFMA to figure out how we can better partner together.

Sal Marino:  What do you enjoy most about your job?

Tobin Paxton: I love talking to people. Our customer base is just endlessly fascinating. When we were starting Miter, the first question we asked wasn’t “how big is the market?” The first question was: is this something we could see ourselves doing for decades? This is not a project you embark on unless you can wake up in 20 years and be totally thrilled doing what you’re doing.

Sal Marino: So take us back a bit. How did you get started in your career?

Tobin Paxton: I started out consulting on vertical software across many different industries. One of the most formative projects was working with trucking companies, helping owner-operators understand their costs on a per-job basis. That planted a seed in my mind about the power of unlocking industry-specific workflows that the existing software just wasn’t addressing.

I then joined an early-stage HR software startup, one of the first employees. We weren’t solving a core enough problem for the C-suite, and that became clear pretty quickly. But while I was there, our CEO made a big internal announcement about rolling out a new HRIS and workforce management platform. I remember thinking, I wish we were building that kind of software.

The thing that really tipped it over for me was Thanksgiving. I’m from Amarillo, Texas. My mom is a bookkeeper for a homeless shelter there, and she was late to dinner getting payroll out. I tagged along to see what she was working on. She said, “We just rolled out QuickBooks Desktop and it’s so much more advanced than what we had before.” I remember just working through it with her thinking, holy smokes, this is the advanced version of what you’re dealing with.

Those experiences got my ears perked up to some interesting problems. And then when I moved to California and met my co-founder Connor, it turned from a curiosity into an obsession. He had been interning as a bookkeeper for a construction firm and thinking deeply about the intersection of technology, construction, and accounting for years.

We started meeting up after work. I watched his 100-yard stare turn into a 200-yard stare, turn into a 300-yard stare as he got deeper into the problems that construction CFOs wrestle with every day. Finally we said, let’s just reach out to firms in the Bay Area, tell them we’re not trying to sell anything, we want to bring lunch and watch you do your job and ask so many dumb questions you’ll be annoyed with us by the end. Surprisingly, a lot of people took us up on it.

It only took three or four of those visits. We went to an asphalt company doing large Caltrans projects and saw just how deep their people had to go to stay compliant and understand what was happening on the job site, and how under-equipped their back office was to answer really important business questions. On the drive home, we both called our significant others and said we were quitting our jobs.

Sal Marino: Is your mom still using QuickBooks?

Tobin Paxton: She is! Every time I go home to Amarillo, something lodges in my mind that goes right onto our product roadmap. Last trip, I drove with her to the bank to drop off money, they still write paper checks. I try not to bring too much work into those conversations, but it’s getting harder.

Sal Marino: Does she know she’s the inspiration?

Tobin Paxton: I think so. Both my parents are CPAs. They’d probably deny that they’ve been subtly influencing me my entire life, but I suspect secretly they’re both thrilled that all roads lead to counting.

Sal Marino: How has Miter’s original vision evolved since you started?

Tobin Paxton: Fundamentally, Miter is a human capital management and workforce management platform for contractors. That means understanding how well you’re doing at hiring, retaining, and promoting your team, and understanding what’s actually happening on the job site. Are we making money or losing money on a given project?

On the product side, things have expanded substantially. 

Sal Marino: What are the biggest challenges you’re seeing construction companies face?

Tobin Paxton: Labor is the obvious one. I was on site with a customer earlier this week and when I asked that question, they just said: manpower. Full stop.

There’s unprecedented infrastructure investment right now: the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, data centers. More money is flowing into U.S. infrastructure than the New Deal. This is a New New Deal level of investment. And at the same time, workers are leaving the workforce. Depending on the estimate, there are roughly 500,000 workers who need to be hired into construction over the next few years. More demand than ever, and it’s never been harder to compete for talent. That tension probably occupies more mindshare for our customers than anything else.

Sal Marino: Where do you see the most friction in day-to-day operations?

Tobin Paxton: Before a CFO can make better decisions, you need to get your data backbone right. Do you trust the information coming in? Do you have systems to verify it? Does it talk to other systems so everyone across the business is working from data they trust?

We’re still in the early innings of moving to the cloud and having interoperable systems. We recently signed up a large ENR-ranked contractor with 900 employees, moving up and down the East Coast. Their CFO told us they were still cutting paper checks in the field for reimbursements and per diems, and their time system and payroll system didn’t talk to each other. It could take weeks to know if they were making money on a job.

When you’re that size, clarity and near real-time visibility is the most fundamental problem. And we’re seeing a lot of firms pulling the future forward as fast as they can.

Sal Marino: What are the biggest opportunities for construction finance teams to work smarter?

Beyond that, there are real automation opportunities. We think about it less as removing humans from the loop, and more as putting your team in an Iron Man suit. If you’re a controller spending hours in Excel on manual tasks, certified payroll reports, prevailing wage calculations, weighted average overtime, multi-state tax filings; what if you could eliminate most of that and instead spend your time on your leadership program, your recruiting strategy, building an employer brand that makes people want to work for you?

Sal Marino: How were you first introduced to CFMA?

Tobin Paxton: I’ve personally attended about 40 national and regional CFMA events. In the early days, we were attending various industry events and you could almost see people’s eyes glaze over when they read “payroll” or “construction accounting” on our booth. It was discouraging.

Then we went to our very first CFMA conference and it was like, these are our people. This was the highest density of people in the industry who cared deeply about these problems and actually wanted to talk about them. We almost stumbled into it five years ago. Now we have just over 200 customers who are CFMA members.

What I love about the local CFMA communities is the combination of eager up-and-coming young professionals trying to grow their careers alongside incredibly experienced people who want nothing more than to help others move up the learning curve.

Sal Marino: Now you’re an Elite Partner. What are you most excited about?

Tobin Paxton: When we were in early conversations with CFMA about partnering, we put the Miter mission and the CFMA mission side by side. You could argue there was some plagiarism; the Venn diagram was essentially perfect overlap. It comes down to advancing the industry.

Miter’s internal mission is a better built world, supporting the people who are shaping the physical environment around us and helping them build more resilient companies. The most exciting thing about this partnership is the access to people who care as much about solving these problems as we do, have tremendous context and experience, and aren’t shy about sharing it. CFMA members speak their minds. They’re willing to go deep on really hard problems. We just want to maximize those learning interactions as much as possible.

Sal Marino: Outside of work, what do you enjoy?

Tobin Paxton: This is boring, but I have a toddler at home. My outside-of-work hours are changing diapers, chasing a toddler, and trying to catch up on sleep. Beyond that, hiking and going to the park with my kid. I don’t really have much time for anything else at this stage of life.

Sal Marino: What might listeners be surprised to learn about you?

Tobin Paxton: I’m a sixth-generation Texan living in California. I get a lot of grief for it, I genuinely miss Amarillo in a lot of ways. I’m probably in California for the long haul given my wife’s family is here. Other than that, I’m a pretty open book. I spend most of my time thinking about certified payroll across various states and how Miter itself hires, attracts, and retains great people.

Sal Marino: I’ve been ending conversations with a fill-in-the-blank: In the future, I hope CFMA will _____.

Tobin Paxton: I’ll give you two.

First, I hope CFMA becomes the center of gravity for the best construction finance content, even beyond its own membership. For example, I was recently talking to someone in Southern California asking: with the Palisades fires and the upcoming Olympics, do we have the labor to do both? What are the actual dynamics there? There’s a huge opportunity for CFMA to produce detailed, long-form editorial content on questions like, what are contractors in that region wrestling with, and what are other CFMA members doing to anticipate it? There’s an opportunity to 10X that kind of content.

Second, my favorite CFMA moment was a Miami chapter dinner, about 25 or 30 people, centered around the question of how are we moving to the cloud. Seeing how engaged and eager everyone was to share and learn from each other gave me deep conviction that anyone who is in construction or cares about construction finance should be a CFMA member. How do you merchandise those hyper-local interactions and networks to widen the tent and bring in a lot more members over the next few years?

Sal Marino: Tobin, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining.

Tobin Paxton: Likewise,  this is one of the top podcasts in my feed these days. Thank you for the time.

Sal Marino: Thank you all for joining another episode of Voices of CFMA, sponsored by Premier Construction Software. Learn more at cfma.org. See you next month!