The saying goes, "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." And so it was in 1985, when I had the good fortune to be hired as a carpenter's helper by a small remodeling company in Washington, D.C. I didn't know it at the time, but I had stumbled upon a growing company where I would find my niche creating an estimating system that by 2013 would help sell and produce many millions of dollars of profitable remodeling work.

Estimating is the most critical and yet most often overlooked discipline in a construction company. A crusty old carpenter with memories and a scratch-pad is not an effective estimating system, and neither is a slick software package or an Excel spreadsheet, at least not on its own. Rather, estimating needs to be intertwined with your entire...

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