About a year ago, Steve “Doc” Scheidecker began searching for a software tool his Indianola employer, Phillips’ Floors Inc., could use to efficiently estimate flooring jobs to generate competitive bids for contractors.

Unable to find an effective program, Scheidecker developed his own. Now, he’s spinning off his invention, Floorgraph, as a stand-alone product that he believes will generate interest nationwide.

“The programs we looked at it didn’t make it very easy,” said Scheidecker, 25,who built Phillips’ first website when he was 11 years old. “So we needed a way to more quickly pull all these measurements off of blueprints.”

Simply a necessity

Developing Floorgraph was a competitive necessity to tackle big projects, said Tim Phillips, president of TS Investments LLC, the parent company of Phillips’ Floors as well as two other businesses that Scheidecker developed.

“We pull a lot of large prints,” Phillips said. “We have to manually roll those prints out and measure every single room and take notes. Floorgraph allows us to basically take that print and download it into our computer. It’s 50 percent faster, and it pretty much eliminates measuring errors.”

Among the projects in which Phillips has used the product was Karl Chevrolet’s new showroom in Ankeny. “We had prints on about half of it, and no prints on the other half,” Phillips said. “It took us about 45 minutes to calculate the half that had the prints using Floorgraph. To measure the rest of it by hand, it took us three hours. That’s when you realize just what this program is doing for you.”

Simplicity was the mantra in designing the software, Scheidecker said.

“We really tried to ax any button that’s not really useful,” he said. “We used the test, what are we going to use on 90 percent of the drawings? If we’re going to use it on 5 to 10 percent, let’s not worry about it. Not that we left anything out, but we really tried to keep it simple.”

In addition to flooring contractors, Floorgraph is also being tested by painters, drywallers, trim carpenters and other trades that need to estimate jobs by the square foot. Among the program’s strengths is that it automatically knocks out doorway spaces or other openings when estimating square footage.

Because the software is subscription-based, contractors can register and begin using the program within a matter of minutes, Sheidecker said. “And if your computer crashes, no big deal – find another computer that has an Internet browser, and all your stuff is right where you left it.”

Ready for market

When Phillips’ vice president of commercial construction initially presented the idea toScheidecker, he already had a few other irons in the fire with software businesses in development.

“But we sat down and whipped together a real quick look, and we started refining it. Now we have it to the point that it’s a product we’re looking to commercialize.”

In November, TS Investments received a $50,000 commercialization grant from the Iowa Department of Economic Development, which the company is using to prepare market presentations for Floorgraph.

Last month, Scheidecker presented the product during a national flooring conference in Reno, Nev. “I would almost refer to that as a soft launch,” he said, noting that about 900 companies attended the event.

Scheidecker also used social media to find contractors willing to test the software. “I had an overwhelming response, a lot more than I thought I would.” One contractor from Great Britain downloaded the software to test, which resulted in Scheidecker adding a metric conversion tool.

Floorgraph subscribers will pay a fee of $50 per user per month, or about the cost of a doorway threshold, Phillips said.

Phillips figures that the software has enabled his company to double the number of competitive bids it submits while at the same time increasing the accuracy of those bids.

“If you’ve ever been part of the bidding process on a larger project, you’ll understand that making a mistake on a larger bid could be devastating,” he said. “It’s a sickening feeling to think, ‘I just did this job for free.’”