I Thought The Hard Part Would Be The Math

When I bought a sign company, I knew almost nothing about the sign industry.

I had spent most of my career in technology and consulting. I’d worked with companies on systems, processes, data, operations, and all the other things that sound important in conference rooms. I knew how businesses worked. What I didn’t know was how signs got designed, fabricated, permitted, installed, serviced, and quoted.

Like most outsiders, I assumed estimating was mostly a math problem.

Customer wants a sign.
Figure out the materials.
Figure out the labor.
Add some markup.
Send the quote.

The more time I’ve spent around estimators, project managers, fabricators, and installers, the more I’ve realized how wrong that assumption was.

The math is usually the easy part.

The hard part is everything that happens before the math.

A customer sends over a rendering and asks for pricing. The rendering tells you what they want the finished sign to look like, but it doesn’t tell you half the things you actually need to know. It doesn’t tell you what the site is like. It doesn’t tell you if the city is easy to work with or notoriously difficult. It doesn’t tell you whether the customer changes their mind every week or signs approvals and disappears until installation day.

It definitely doesn’t tell you about the giant rock you’re going to hit while digging a footing.

The longer I’ve owned Sign Pro, the more I’ve come to appreciate that experienced estimators aren’t really estimating signs. They’re estimating all the stuff around the sign.

They’re estimating risk.

That’s why two experienced estimators can look at the same project and come up with different numbers. When I first got into the business, I assumed one of them had to be wrong. Now I think they’re often just carrying different scars.

One guy remembers a permit process that turned into a nightmare.

Another remembers an installation that took twice as long as expected.

Another remembers a customer who approved everything and then changed the entire project after production started.

Those experiences become part of how people estimate. They don’t show up as line items on a quote, but they’re there.

One thing that has surprised me while building Ryvet is how much more respect I have for estimators now than when we started. Going into this, I thought we were building software that would help generate estimates. What I’ve learned is that estimating isn’t really the difficult part. Judgment is.

Several of the beta users accidentally reinforced that lesson for me. One user described Ryvet as “the other estimator we’ve been looking for.” Another said it helped as a price check before sending a quote. Another liked that it included things he might have forgotten to account for. Nobody treated it like an autopilot button.

Honestly, that was encouraging.

If you’ve spent enough time around construction, signs, manufacturing, or really any skilled trade, you start to realize that experienced people are valuable because of what they’ve learned, not because they can do arithmetic.

Software can calculate.
Software can organize information.
Software can compare options.
What software struggles with is judgment.

Judgment comes from seeing the same mistake happen enough times that you recognize it before it happens again.

The more customer conversations I’ve had, the less interested I’ve become in replacing estimators and the more interested I’ve become in helping them move faster. Those are two very different goals.

One of the realities of the sign industry is that experienced people are hard to find. Every shop owner I’ve talked to is trying to figure out how to quote more work, manage more projects, train newer employees, and keep up with customer demand without continuously adding headcount.

That’s not a software problem.
That’s a business problem.

Ryvet just happens to be the tool we’re building to help address a small piece of it.

What’s funny is that after all the development, testing, customer calls, and conversations, I ended up back where I started.

I still think estimating is hard.
I just don’t think it’s hard for the reason I originally thought.
The hard part was never the math.

The hard part is knowing what math matters.