About Astra Estimating

Our personal approach allows us to understand our clients current needs, the goals they want to achieve and the culture of their company. We identify the current needs of our customers, identify problems they are facing and work together to achieve the highest results possible.

We continue to grow year after year and our customer retention rate remains high based on our unique approach to estimating and winning our clients projects while staying profitable.

I Was the Contractor

In 1993 I started my own electrical contracting business, and for seven years I lived the life most contractors know too well: feast and famine. Busy seasons that somehow did not produce profit. Slow seasons that ate whatever was left. When it ended, I had almost nothing to show for it. I lost the business, the marriage, and eventually I went through bankruptcy.

What I did have was a head for numbers. I was the kid with the Tandy 1000, good at math and computers before that was a career. And that turned out to matter more than I knew.

The Discovery

After my business, I went to work for ComputerEase, a construction-based accounting software company, where I learned construction accounting inside and out. My job put me inside contracting companies doing millions a year, and I saw something that changed everything: these large contractors had the exact same problem I had as the little guy. Low profit. Feast and famine. No idea why.

I identified the problem, and it was overhead. Overhead was the unknown number, because accounting software does not compute it. Nobody knew what an hour of their own company actually cost, so nobody could price work correctly. So I built a prototype to fix it.

The Proof

After I left ComputerEase, I got a job with a local electrical contractor named Morgan Electric. The owner's three-year average was a 1 percent net profit. He had been through bankruptcy twice. He was paying himself 25,000 dollars a year.

He let me run his business and his estimating using the prototype and the numbers-first approach that became the Astra 5 Point Method. In less than a year and a half, I generated over 4.5 million dollars in new revenue for the business. The owner's pay went from 25,000 to over 300,000 a year, and his net profit went from 1 percent to 15.1 percent, after his pay.

I knew I had a good thing. I left and started Astra Estimating and MyOverhead.com.

The Record

The Akron Beacon Journal told the story in 2006. The Houston Chronicle headlined it "The Secret to Making Money: It's Overhead." Since then the approach has been featured in over 38 newspapers around the country, including USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. The president of the Akron Better Business Bureau called it the best program for business owners he had seen in 20 years.

"The Secret to Making Money: It's Overhead."

For more than 25 years since, this has been the work: teaching contractors their real numbers, and estimating their work so those numbers win.

Why Astra Estimating Exists

Astra Estimating is that whole story turned into a service, and today it is one of the largest independent estimating services in the country. Every estimate we produce starts where my own recovery started: your overhead, your breakeven, your labor rate, your profit target. Your numbers. Then we qualify the projects worth bidding, build relationships with the GCs in your name, produce professional piece-by-piece estimates you can job cost against, and track the results until you win. That is the 5 Point Method, and it exists because I lived what happens without it.