The tool I wish I’d had

Fast Estimating Quotes · RMI Works, Madisonville, Tennessee

My name’s Rocky McCoy. I run a small outfit in Madisonville, Tennessee — RMI Works. These days I’m mostly doing remodeling here in Tennessee — not building across Florida the way I once did. But I’ve spent a long time in this trade, and I built this program to be the thing I wish somebody had handed me when I was starting out.

Here’s the truth: estimating is where a lot of good builders get hurt. You can swing a hammer all day and do beautiful work, but if your numbers are soft, you lose money on a job you were proud of. I watched it happen to people. I had it happen to me. Nobody teaches you how to count a house from the ground up — you learn it the hard way, one underbid job at a time.

This program started a long way back. My father wrote estimating programs in BASIC in 1980 — that’s how far this idea goes in my family. Over the years it moved from his code into Microsoft Access, and eventually I rebuilt the whole thing in modern tools so it could do what I always wanted it to do: take a house, break it down into the real materials and labor it takes to build, price it out honestly, and let you change anything you know better than the program does.

That last part matters to me. This isn’t a black box that hands you a number and tells you to trust it. You see every line. You see where the price came from. If your block man charges more than the program guessed, you change it — it’s your estimate, built your way, for your market. I just give you the bones.

I made the heart of this thing free on purpose. There are folks coming into this trade with more grit than money — young people, people starting over, people who came to this country with nothing but a willingness to work. I’ve been close enough to the edge to know what a tight year feels like. If a free tool keeps somebody from losing their shirt on a bad bid, that’s worth more to me than a subscription. A lot of you are already doing more with less than I ever did — you just need a tool that respects your time and doesn’t lie to you about money.

So that’s the deal. Build all the estimates you want, free, for as long as you want. And if this helped you — leave a review, send a few sample reports back my way. I’m just getting this off the ground, and a handful of honest builders giving it a try is exactly what I need to get it on its feet. You’d be helping the next person who’s where you are right now.

Good luck out there. Build something you’re proud of.

— Rocky McCoy RMI Works TN · Madisonville, Tennessee
rmiworkstn.com