QuickScale - how it all began

For years I can remember my husband, who is a quantity surveyor, sitting at the dining room table in frustration, trying to take measurements off an A0 drawing. For each drawing he used to make up his own scale rule with a piece of paper, just so he could take off his dimensions. The trouble was each drawing was either not to scale or to a different unrecognisable scale and none of his home-made scale rules ever fit another drawing. For years he would say that he wished someone would come up with a simple software solution. All he needed was to be able to plot two site measurements to scale the drawing … and no-one did.

My husband has come up with a lot of ideas, some crazy, some clever but I was too busy working or looking after our kids to take them seriously. A few years ago, after another lengthy, time wasting session at the dining room table making his umpteenth scale rule, I started thinking that maybe this idea could make sense.

I did a lot of research trying to find software that solved this problem. All I could find was complicated programs that were hard for us to understand and did so much more than we needed. As I said my husband is a quantity surveyor and I had always been on the admin side of architectural and surveying companies so our IT knowledge was limited to Word and Excel.

The more we thought about it and the more we spoke to colleagues in the trade, we realised just how many other people there were out there with exactly the same problem. After two and a half years of hard work, determination and battling against the most unimaginable obstacles, we started selling QuickScale in January of this year.

In one of the talks I went to, the speaker said that having little knowledge about the business you are working on is a good thing because if you knew what you were going to be facing, trying to set up and successfully run that business, you would not get up in the morning. Boy, was that ever true. We seemed to go from one catastrophe to another and no matter how much planning ahead I did, we could not avoid this because they were completely out of our control or our knowledge or understanding at the time.

We had no programming knowledge or experience of launching a software company what-so-ever so we relied on others completely for this. Unfortunately we had a number of setbacks with regards people leaving due to serious illnesses, major surgery and personal matters. Two of the many, many technical problems we had was our website left our server and hooked up to a server in Canada for 2 days and our email server did not receive all our emails. Problems still arise constantly, as some of our customers will know, but we do our utmost to help them and sort the problems out.

What makes it all worthwhile is the comments and feedback we are now getting. A few customers have said that they would rather pay for QuickScale than use the free software available because its so easy to use. Another said that he didn’t mean to be rude but QuickScale is simple. I cant remember the number of times I have had desperate phone calls from customers saying that their trial version has expired and they needed QuickScale urgently to carry on with their estimating but their money hadn’t gone through yet.

Hopefully the business will grow, especially as we have so many more ideas and products to start writing and eventually selling. If I look back and ask myself if I would do it all again, the answer would be yes. Yes because of our wonderful customers with their wonderful comments and their patience when something goes wrong.

The sales-y bit:

QuickScale works on any drawing, scanned doc or photo saved as pdf by entering the scale of the drawing and one site measurement. If there is no scale, you need to enter two site measurements. That’s all – you can then take off any measurement or any shaped area within seconds and, without printing the drawing.

If you do need to print, you can print to scale on A3 or A4 even if the original was created in A0.

Most drawings have standard items like door frames and you will know that these are 900mm. You can use one or two of these as your site reference so you don’t even need to go to site at all.