About
Built by pops, not by a software company
Thirty-plus years on real job sites, not a software company’s idea of what a contractor needs.
Pops started as an electrician in 1989, on jobs that didn’t leave room for guessing — plant maintenance, high-voltage systems, boilers and generators that don’t get a second chance if the math is wrong. That’s where the habit started: get the numbers right, or don’t touch it.
A decade in, he was running the electrical side of a growing contractor, building it from a small crew into a company with well over a hundred employees and tens of millions in annual work — in under two and a half years. Somewhere in there, the company’s estimating system couldn’t keep up with how fast it was growing, so he built a new one himself. It let one person turn out twenty-five or thirty estimates in a single day. Nobody asked him to build software. The job needed it, so he did.
Then he started his own electrical contracting business — one employee to start, twenty within two years, growing to nearly three million dollars in sales without ever losing the thing he’d learned to protect on the plant floor: a bid has to be right, or everything downstream of it is wrong too.
Years later, running a custom home-building business, he hit the same wall a second time. The estimating software on the market still didn’t price a job the way it actually needed to be priced. So he built his own again — a proprietary budgeting tool, from scratch, because that turned out to be faster than waiting for someone else to build it right.
The same pattern shows up in Construction Bid Manager too — a real bid-tracking system pops built to run his own jobs, long before PoPs Suite existed. What’s running today is that same tool, modernized and updated, not something built from scratch to fill out a product lineup.
PoPs Suite is that same instinct, built a third time — bigger, and for other people this time instead of just himself. Not a software company’s idea of what a contractor needs. A contractor’s own answer to a problem he’s already solved twice, handed to the small companies still stuck solving it the hard way.