Jason Phillips: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Phillips. This show exists to help small business owners like you escape the tyranny of Contractor Freedom and enter the bliss of Contractor Freedom so you can have the Time, Money, and Freedom to Live Your Life With Purpose Beyond Your Business.

As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life, love, leadership, and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.

Let's go. 

Jason Phillips: I've got a special treat for you today. I've got with us, Tom Droste, CEO of Estimate Rocket. And Tom coaches company leaders in sales and profit planning. And guess what? Software implementation as well. In case you don't know Estimate Rocket, it's an all in one business management platform. Software for contractors that helps them run their entire business.

They say [00:01:00] from lead to paid all on one platform. So let's jump right into it. Tom, welcome to the show today. How are you doing? 

Tom Droste: I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for 

Jason Phillips: absolutely. Me as well. Quick question. How long has Estimate Rocket been a thing?

Tom Droste: Sure. Estimate Rockets, been a thing for about, seven years. 

Jason Phillips: So what, you know, did you have a software background or a contracting background? What gave birth?

Tom Droste: Yeah, so I started, in accounting. that was my, that's what I went to school for and did that for Two years and decided this isn't a lot of fun, but I started, , using computers in my accounting career and I said, this is fun and, got spreadsheets, which at the time were brand new phenomenon and, just really got hooked on it.

I went and quit my, great. high paying full benefits job as an accountant and went to work at a computer store, at the time. So that was my, I turned, I found out recently that my father in law thought I was absolutely a lunatic for quitting this great job I had with benefits and everything[00:02:00] going to a computer store. I was at the computer store for about a year and then I started helping people, Do business things with their computers. And I just really got hooked on it. And then that kind of morphed into building applications. and, this is actually my second software company, the first one, did a whole different area of work, but I will say that one of the first things I ever wrote was actually an estimating program for a plumber.

And this was back in the day when, data was stored on these little things called floppy disks. wE're going way, way back. And we complain about now, about how things are slow and, they're Things aren't, you can't, not enough capacity and we're talking days when, it wasn't a meg that you were sending for a photo.

You were lucky if you could send 30k 

Jason Phillips: Yeah, you don't know what slow is until you had to deal with the old floppy disks.

Tom Droste: Exactly. When I started, this company, the company is actually called Logical Engine and we were doing, projects basically for people who needed software. And, we got into doing an estimating application actually for, concrete lifting companies. And [00:03:00] that's how we got it.

That was really the start of it. It was super simple, did very little. And as we grew it, we saw the need for a lot more than what we were doing with that application and expanded it to other trades and really just 

Jason Phillips: You've been, seven years, is quite a long time for software these days. And,...