Over thirty years ago, I set up a building company. During this time I built in excess of 300 extensions and around 80 new builds. The company expanded from one manager and a couple of contractors to a team of six managers and over 40 subcontractors. With a turnover of £4-5 million per annum.

I know how difficult it is to run a small building company. I experienced first-hand working late nights and weekends to turn round quotes for clients. Moreover, I know pricing quotes accurately is crucial to the bottom line – so you can’t afford to cut corners estimating!

My experience also taught me that there was no guarantee of winning the work. So spending hours and hours of precious time doing the quote just wasn’t realistic. I knew there must be another way to produce estimates faster so I looked for an estimating software package that was designed for my sized company – but nothing fitted the bill.

AS A RESULT…

I set about writing my own software to estimate jobs and manage my business and HBXL was born. It took over 4 years of development before the first generation EstimatorXpress was launched. We’re now on EstimatorXpress 2020!

I also spent a great deal of money on architect’s fees, plus hours sorting out my health and safety paper work, and each job required costs to be agreed contractually so everyone was covered. This is why PlansXpress, Health & Safety Xpert and ContractsXpert software tools were introduced.

I realise that not all builders have either the time or inclination to use software. So, I set up HBXL Professional Services to use the power of the software to offer businesses Design, Estimating, Health and Safety and Contracts via my expert building team.

We now have a team of highly experienced construction specialists. In fact many of our team come from a building background running their own building firms. Which means our designs, estimates, health & safety documents and building contracts are practical and professionally produced.

You might also like to know we’re a family company which employs over 20 staff dedicated to software development, supporting your business and making sure that our software and services are right for you.

I’m really happy to say that HBXL Building Software is now the UK market leader in construction software for Small to Medium sized businesses and over 13,000 licences are being used around the UK. We’re proud also that we’ve now estimated nearly half a billion pounds worth of building projects since the launch of HBXL Estimating Service, with our builders going on to win on average 53% of the work we’ve priced up!

If you’d like to get in touch with me directly, please do at adrian@hbxl.co.uk. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for reading.

Adrian Wild