My husband is great at what he does.
His landscaping projects, and the work and the quality of work are very well done and look amazing to me (can’t wait to be in our own house so he can get to work on building the dream yard that I want! Ha)
Here are some examples:
See! He does a great job! He started landscaping soon after we moved to Idaho to support us while I was in school, before eventually going to school himself.
That was about 12 years ago. After a few years, he decided to go off on his own and start his own businesses. We eventually moved back to Utah, and he worked with his brother’s company doing the landscaping before going completely on his own and getting his general contractor’s license.
Throughout all of this, I would handle much of the financial side. When I first started school, I was going into accounting because I loved numbers and budgeting. I even got work at a jewelry store doing their accounting and worked at the school in the financial aid office.
I started with just Excel spreadsheets and a paper system, and when that was getting too hard, we upgraded to QuickBooks. I wasn’t a pro or anything, but I knew how to run QuickBooks and how invoicing, estimating, and tracking worked (with a little help from my dad and his MBA!).
At the same time, I just had my third kid, and then we went on to have numbers four and five. It was hard to try and connect with Quade to get the numbers right, or to make time to do it together, as with a lot of construction companies, when they open their truck and papers fall out everywhere.
I like systems and things organized, and sometimes that’s hard when you’re on the go or busy running a project, with your mind in so many other places (or so I’m told… ha).
So I tried my best to do what I could, which usually was the end-of-the-year gathering of papers, categorizing things in QuickBooks, and not attaching them to any specific project to know how much was actually made on a project.
I would see Quade spend so much time trying to figure out estimates and invoicing, and figuring out costs, that I knew there had to be a better way.
I tried a few different systems: an accordion folder he kept receipts in per project so I could simply enter them into QuickBooks, or manila folders for each project to just slip receipts in, where I wanted to then take the supplies actually purchased and make a growing sheet of material prices to then pull from to make estimating easier.
But then finding out it wasn’t really the cost, but just figuring out the scope of the job and all the pieces of it.
A few years ago, I wanted to build something that would actually help. I tried to research what I wanted, but didn’t come across anything that was exactly right for what I was looking for. So I tried to build it.
I created connections and tried to create pathways to link forms to QuickBooks and add customers, but it didn’t work quite the way I wanted. I made other forms you could add to your home screen to enter receipt info, but they weren’t as easy to use as I thought, and the output didn’t match what I was hoping to export and map to the expenses in QuickBooks.
After last summer, I decided that with the five kids all home from school and trying to focus on them, I couldn’t keep trying to figure this out, or that I couldn’t go weeks with nothing and then try to cram it all in a day, spending hours trying to sort through things that would have taken no time at all if done consistently.
It was getting too frustrating for me, so I decided I needed to step away. But in doing so, I realized that much of the company’s financial structure wouldn’t be completed.
Not because of a lack of commitment, but because being good at a craft and knowing how to run the business side of a company are two completely separate things.
Doesn’t mean the capacity and capability aren’t there, though. I realized that there weren’t many options, programs, or help for small service-based companies. A lot are too expensive for a smaller company, or there are state classes and workshops that most can’t take the time off work to attend because it’s usually them and one crew, maybe two.
I noticed the gap, and I wanted to fill it.
So I created the software Measure Twice Profit Once. The name comes from double-checking the first time to ensure the results are correct… and also from a common construction phrase.
I shortened it to Measure Twice to fit the brand, but it comes from that idea. This is what I built the software for:
- It calculates your overhead, the cost of your business, before you ever even take a job.
- It uses AI to convert your job notes into an estimate, ensuring you never miss a line item. The more you use it, the more accurate it gets with pricing materials and labor costs per line item.
- It’s also integrated with QuickBooks, where your estimate is automatically synced, allowing full compatibility to send them to customers with just another click.
- It also includes scheduling and uses AI to take an estimate, create daily tasks for the entire project, provide materials and tools, and assign employees for the entire scope each day.
- There’s a companion app for it, to be able to use on the go, and a separate app for employees to be able to clock in, and not just for the day, but to click on a specific job to clock into, and then get their tasks for the day that they need to accomplish (or whoever you assign to be given instructions), along with the ability to take pictures of the completed work that they do that gets sent back to you.
I learned Claude Code to build exactly what I wanted, and it took about a month. Then another month to tweak and change, switch and rebrand, add and take away, refine and adjust to make it look the way I wanted, work the way I wanted, and fix all the bugs that kept coming up.
But I’m proud of what I created, and I hope many service businesses will be able to use it to increase their profitability and, more importantly, reduce their stress and know exactly how much money they’re making on each job.
Quade is my first case study (hoping to get more soon!), and after spending all this time building it to help companies, I’m excited to have my husband be the first to use it and watch it work the way I imagined it could.