A Financial App for Hard Hats
The Come Up Episode 12 Transcript
Scrappy:
What up, what up, what up, what up, what up? I’m Scrappy and welcome to The Come Up, a video podcast, featuring Southwest Florida entrepreneurs and business leaders. We’re sponsored by Content With Teeth, a creative content agency with over 20 years of experience right here in Southwest Florida.
As you can see from this fathead behind me, they do it really big, specializing in copywriting and video production. And if you’d like to sponsor The Come Up or be a guest, hit me up @heyscrappy on IG or text MIKE at 21000.
Today is awesome. Very fascinated with these two guys. Our guests are entrepreneurs Randal Kendrix, and FSW’s Dr. Roger Webster. With Randal’s driving spirit and his vision, they’ve created an innovative app called Bid It, Bill It. Randall, this is your baby. So go ahead. Let’s start with you. Tell us about yourself.
Randal Kendrix:
That a heck of an introduction. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So I have spent a long time and still am in the technology world with Canon USA out of New York. But in one of my trips, one day in my typical fashion, I’m sitting in the airport, bored out of my mind, waiting for the next airplane. And I’m wondering what the heck I’m going to do when I grow up. I was thinking back about a conversation I had with my brother and I realized he still works in a very antiquated, in my opinion, antiquated world of creating bills in either hand or with word docs. He writes things down and there’s a typical structure that a contractor goes through as probably in the middle of their busiest part of their day. Someone will call on a bid or estimate on something. They’ll get the crew running, take off, hair on fire, run by the job site, write down some notes, run home. Friday night, Saturday morning early, they start working on these bids.
Short story long is that they end up losing a lot of money because they forget a lot of details along the way. And I’m thinking, all right, how can I figure that out? I did quite a bit of research, but didn’t find anything other than accounting style or just full on construction apps, which are real expensive. And I thought, well, geez, I got to figure this out. So I asked my brother and a couple other contractors around the country said, “How do you do this?” And all of them are kind of the same way, just a real antiquated way. So I thought, well, how hard is it to learn swift code? There’s another guy down at the bottom down here, laughing right now. I got this. I whip out the laptop, and I turn on YouTube. And I realized a month into this. I thought, man, I could be 95 before I figure this whole process out. Considering I could make little stuff, no big deal, but there’s no way I’m going to make this intense app that I want.
So I’ll fast forward a little bit. I go through Fiverr. I find a really great, what I thought was a really great developer, happens to be in India. A lot of exchange of both culture. He doesn’t know how the US culture works, business works. I’m trying to explain it to him in my west Texas vernacular. And he has no clue about the things I’m saying. So literally I don’t have them behind me right now, but I have those big, giant sticky notes that look a lot like these pads, but they’re literally wall size. So I end up literally writing stuff out and making pictures and they were all over this entire living room that I have here. That was the way I got my points across.
So I mean great experience, nothing wrong with it, but even longer stories. We got the app where I thought it would work, launched it. It started getting some users. And then I thought, well, I’m ready to go to phase two. And I thought, okay, that’s great. So I connect with him, start telling him what I want. And then all of a sudden, just AWOL, just gone. So I don’t know if he got another job. I don’t know if his village fell apart. I don’t know what happened to him. Just gone. And then the code kind of crashed. So here I am out quite a bit of money and with no workable apps. I’m thinking, man, I’m done. I’m lost. And honestly, months later, and really I wrote that note actually in another area. And I said, look, I was kind at my wits end and it was almost seriously like a hail Mary pass. I thought I’m going to call literally right outside my door, less than a mile for Southwest.
I said, there’s got to be somebody who knows something about computers over there. And I called Roger, please tell me what was the gentleman’s name? I forgot what was the gentleman’s name that I called?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Albert Nolt.
Randal Kendrix:
Okay. Mr. Nolt. That’s right. I call, I left a message and it was one of those, Scrappy you know. You’ve made millions of calls in your life. You’re not expecting anything to come back and he was on it like the next day. He just popped me right back and said, yeah, you got to talk to this guy. And I’m like, all right, that’s great. So it is a little bit of hope I connect with Roger. And I mean, I can’t tell you, you talk about relationships, just kind of meshing from the moment on. From the moment we met, funny thing is Roger’s literally a mile, not even a mile outside my front doorstep, he’s already created two apps, pretty darn similar to what I’ve done. And he’s just an awesome guy. So I literally feel like I went from little league coach all the way to Joe Tori. I mean, Roger honestly is the saving grace of Bid It, Bill It at this point in time. So I got to give him a lot of credit.
Scrappy:
With many teams, there’s a driver, and there’s a creative or a scientist. And you need kind of those different core competencies to compliment each other, in order to be successful. Roger, so you get this phone call from Randal, crazy Randall. He’s got this great idea, but you’re kind of like the app expert. You’ve done a handful of these in the past. What were you thinking? What’s going through your mind when you heard from Randall for the first time?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Well, I gave him a call and I said, yeah, I can do it. That’s what I do. I have a PhD in computer science from Temple University, School of Engineering in Philadelphia. Two master’s degrees in computer science, a bachelor of science degree in computer science. And I’ve been teaching computer science for 40 years before I came to Florida Southwest, I was in the Pennsylvania state university system, teaching computer science and teaching app development up there. So I came down to FSW and I retired from there. But instead of retiring, I decided, yeah, I’d like to do a little bit more teaching. So that’s what I do. And I told him, yeah, I can do that for you. So we met it off and I started writing the code and the app is really, really nice. We’re in beta test right now. It’s up on the app store, beta test. Another couple of weeks, it’ll be in full version and looks great.
Scrappy:
Randal, roadblocks and road bumps happen all the time. You go through Fiverr, you go through this guy in India, you get frustrated, but where you are now, are you better off with Roger than if you had been successful previously?
Randal Kendrix:
Oh, I mean, it just fills my face with just excitement. I can’t believe it. Looking back, I mean, I was really in a moment of despair when I got to that point where just everything just kind of fell apart and I’m thinking, ah, money, time, effort, created all these channels and all this. And then you look back at it now where I thought probably was a complete wash out of a road. It appears now that it’s more of just like a bump in the road. And I know a lot of business people around, not only around Florida Southwest, I travel around the world and I’ve heard some horror stories and it felt like one at the time. And then when somebody gets on the other side of that little bump, they look back at it and yeah, it wasn’t that big a deal so far.
Scrappy:
I’m sorry. Many entrepreneurs go through that. Many entrepreneurs have those bumps, those frustrations. They’ve got freelancers that flake out on them and so forth. And I think that’s kind of cool that you’re both rooted in Southwest Florida because that’s been kind of a come together as well. Now both of you have incredible resumes, have done incredible things. Why Southwest Florida? Roger, you first.
Dr. Roger Webster:
Well, my parents moved from Massachusetts down here to Estero, Florida, and they bought a nice little place here about 15 years ago. And I would visit them in the winter of course, and absolutely love it because in Pennsylvania, there’s six feet of snow and down here, it’s 80 degrees in the winter. So I visited them quite a bit in the winter. And I decided when I retired in 2018 that I would buy a place in Florida. And I bought a place in the same community as them, four doors down, actually. And I still have the place in Pennsylvania. I’m down here nine months, a year and up there three months in the summer and it’s been quite nice.
Scrappy:
And Randal, you’re a Texas New York guy, all of a sudden you’re in Southwest Florida. What brought you here?
Randal Kendrix:
Born and raised in Texas and this gorgeous blonde girl I met in New York of all places. So Texas, New York and we meet up in Fort Myers. Actually her folks lived here and right after we got married, she moved to Texas for a couple years. And then I had a chance to come back and man, I’ve never looked back. This is my hometown. I’m a Texan by birth, but boy, I love Florida.
Scrappy:
It’s pretty amazing that here in Southwest Florida, we can do global things. Your company Bid It, Bill It, what’s your niche and differential advantage versus the competition?
Randal Kendrix:
Well, thanks for that. I searched long, like I said, I searched a long time. And what I found is if you know anything about contractors, I’m sure you’ve used people either where you are now, where you lived, they’re craftsman. I mean, if you bring a carpenter in, he’s not an accountant, that’s not what he likes to do. And he doesn’t want to go home and mess with a computer. So I thought, how on earth? And honestly, most of the guys I dealt with early on with Fiverr really wanted to create a very detailed, difficult program. And I just kept rejecting it going, if there’s not a way I’m just going to not do it at all. But there has to be a way, because I look at my iPhone, which I absolutely love. And while it’s a really complex computer, nobody makes it simpler. And so that was the whole thought process.
So what we do differently now, and we will add more as we go, but we want to make that experience one really, really quick and simple to learn. I just did a video last night and I uploaded it to YouTube, which I got to redo. But the whole thing, I think I did five or six minutes. And that’s with an intro. That’s start to finish to opening up the app and creating your first invoice to email to a customer. That’s the whole idea. So no more scribbled notes than waiting two or three days, four, five days to create all your invoices or quotes, you can do it on the fly. So the idea is have it in your hand, it’s local. Don’t need wifi necessarily. It’s on local. I can create a bid in a bill, immediately send it to a customer before I leave their house. Or if I just want to use it for notes, fine. We’ve got pictures in it, but simplicity, which is my whole idea. Simplify your business. That’s the whole mantra of Bid It, Bill It. If I can’t make it simple, I probably won’t make it.
Scrappy:
So how do you differentiate yourself from Get Jobber, Velocity, Procore, Buildertrend?
Randal Kendrix:
Super detailed on the Procore’s, ours is a simplistic bid and/or invoice. So while we may add functionality like that someday, I think that when you look at the department of labor statistics, there’s somewhere between 800 and 1.2 million services folks on the planet. And if you look around at what they use the usage on Quicken by folks in that realm is minimal. They’ll pay someone else to do it. So the thought is to get… Let’s say you have a half million of those. If you get 1% of those huge, huge marketplace, and it’s so simple for them to use the folks that we’ve introduced, it took so far said, well, how much are you going to charge for this? Well right now, nothing. It’s free. We want you to use it and understand it and go from there.
At some point, I think we’ll have a next version, Roger, that will have a charge to it, but it’ll have more information, but the thought is to always have the free, just for those who just want something super simple, boom, and it looks professional. You can upload your own logo. A lot of folks, you can’t do that.
Scrappy:
So from a functionality standpoint, whether it’s organization, speed, manpower, having less of it, saving time, being organized, you really fit to bill, right?
Randal Kendrix:
I think so. Go ahead, Roger.
Dr. Roger Webster:
Fast, easy and powerful. It’s very powerful behind the scenes, but the GUI, the graphic user interface is very simple and easy to use. We use SQL databases on the back end. So we have a database for customers, a database for invoices and a database for how it looks and feels. And it’s very easy to use and it’s customizable. You can make it be an invoicing app for any business you want. You can change all the different categories, the invoice items, the prices, the description, and it’s completely customizable. And you can use your phone to take pictures of the site. We attach that to the invoice and you can print it, send it by text or send it by email.
Scrappy:
Does that translate to the customer? Because here I am doing something for my house and I’ve got credibility issues. I’ve got trustworthy issues with contractors. I’m just going to keep it real. That’s how I feel. So with your invention, can you help me out? The customer out as well, your second customer, so to speak?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Absolutely because the contractor can send you a text, an email or print it right there as he’s doing the quote and you’ll see exactly detailed items of what it’s going to cost. And it’s a quote. And then if you say, yes, I’d like to do it. Then the contractor has a contract between you and the contractor.
Scrappy:
I understand that you guys are in your second year. Randal, how have you progressed?
Randal Kendrix:
The first year and a half, it’s essentially wasted. Not wasted, but wasted time so to speak. Cause I had to start everything over and we’ve been about six ish months Roger, into the new version?
Dr. Roger Webster:
About six months.
Randal Kendrix:
So we’re just in our beta. And as of this week, or probably next week, we will launch the full on polished version of it. And then we’ll be able to hit it worldwide or countrywide, whatever we want to do on that side, which now is the big job now of making sure I get exposure. Which also thank you very much for doing this for us. Just getting the word out and getting in people’s, in their mindset.
Scrappy:
Do you have downloads now or are you just anticipating a huge amount in six months?
Randal Kendrix:
Obviously the drive is six months from now, but we have some downloads now. I’ve tried to minimize just because we’re still very much in a beta site and I don’t want to have people have a bad experience with even the smallest of feature sets. So I’ve kind of kept it quiet, but we’re literally about a week or two weeks out from just doing a massive blast media style blast.
Dr. Roger Webster:
Very, very close, very close. As you know, software is beta testing before it actually goes worldwide on the market to work out some of the initial user bugs, but we’ve got almost all of them done.
Scrappy:
Both of you guys are fascinating to me because you’re grinding really hard on another job. And here you are doing something special for lack of a better term, on the side. So Randal, how many hours are you putting into your real gig, so to speak or your first gig Canon, and then how much time can you put into this?
Randal Kendrix:
I am thankfully an early riser. So I’m up around between four and five, so that’s when I get most of my stuff done. I will spend two to three hours daily or as much as possible, but on average, two, three hours a day on Bid It. And then of course my other job, Canon, is a full-time. So, and that depends on travel. Now I will say if I’m in the middle of an airplane or if I’m driving and I can make calls, obviously if I’m not doing stuff for work, I’ll jump on it, do it at lunch, all that kind of stuff.
Scrappy:
Roger, as a doctor, Roger, at FSW, you had certainly educational responsibilities, but you too, you’ve created a bunch of apps. You’ve been on the cutting edge of app creation. How do you balance the two?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Well, I’m an early riser, just like Randal. And in fact, when we first hit it off, I said, what time do you want to meet? And I said, because I get up at 5:00 AM. If you want to meet by Zoom at 6:00 AM. That’s okay with me. So by nine o’clock I’ve got four hours in before people even wake up and weekends of course, things like that. Number of apps and another consulting clients as well doing app work.
Scrappy:
How about, you mentioned that you’re getting some exposure, but from a marketing perspective, looking out from a timeline, one, two years, how are you penetrating?
Randal Kendrix:
Honestly, not just to toot your own horn, but I want services from folks like yourself. I’m going to need that. I can only go so far. Even with that background from Canon and the advertising and business development, all that, I can only go so far and the bandwidth runs out. I’m going to need some serious help once we get to a certain point. And I think we kind of have a number in mind, but we’ll see how that works out, but definitely want a full on nationwide push at this. I hope within this first half of next year is the thought,
Scrappy:
Okay. Okay. And entrepreneurs, you take risks. You have no fear of failure. Tell us about your entrepreneurial spirit Randal.
Randal Kendrix:
Oh, I have plenty of fear.
I’m just too stupid to stop, I guess. From a young age, I actually owned my own paint contracting business when I was 18. And I’ve never fully given that up. I do more consulting than anything now. And then I do my own projects as well, but I have always had a desire of some level to keep my hands moving and legs and just keep moving and keep asking about this. And even when I’m in my other job, I like to ask a lot of questions and I’m probably too curious at times. I love learning stuff. Especially in this day and age, there’s so much emphasis on the college degree and push and push and push and that’s all great. But boy, there’s also a massive shortage in this world that I’m working on with the app right now with the blue collar guys, the tradesmen. And always had a heart for those guys cause they work hard and they just kind of get the crap of the world. They get beat up a lot.
Scrappy:
Given their blue collars, is there an opportunity for grassroots movement?
Randal Kendrix:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m thrilled. One of my heroes right now is, I’m sure you know who he is, Mike Rowe, who’s got his foundation to give scholarships. And as a local guy, I’m pushing as many people as I can without an affiliation Mike, to his scholarships because man, there’s a lot, there’s good money to be made in it. And I can tell you of all the things that I do for a living, the most satisfying stuff is when I’m creating something in my garage or in the house, you can put something together and go, I did that. So it’s a really great feeling.
Scrappy:
Roger, I’ve been here for 18 years and I have a relationship with FSW. I am blown away by the growth over the last 18 years. Can you tell us about your university?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Oh, FSW is a wonderful, I say little college. It’s not really very little. I mean there’s three campuses, Lee County and Collier County and Henry Glades. And I think there’s 25, 30,000 students. I mean at FSW, among the three campuses and in computer science, we’re growing so big that they’re blowing away the inside of the building we’re in right now and putting a $7 million renovation for the school of business and technology and computer science and our cyber security. We offer computer programming and cyber security and of course cyber security and programming, both are really big business. And we’re expanding, we’re hiring faculty, we’re hired two new people. We’re going to hire probably two or three new, more people next year. And it’s really growing leaps and bounds.
Scrappy:
It seems like in this age, everybody has an entrepreneurial spirit. When you look in the eyes of the juniors and the seniors that you teach, do you see that?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Oh yeah, absolutely. And I always tell them, Hey, if you have a great idea for an app, tell me so I can write it for you. But they’ll be able to write it themselves after next semester. And this coming January, spring semester, I’ll be teaching COMP 3655, which is mobile development for a mobile application development for devices. And we’ll be doing iPhone development and Android development. And they will have the first time in FSWs history, a class being taught on how to develop iPhone and Android.
Scrappy:
Wow. Wow. You’re going to give your students a little equity position though, right?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Well, I always tell ’em. I say just because you have a good idea. It doesn’t mean you can make it happen so you know, have great ideas. It’s wonderful, but you’re going to need people like myself and my students to actually develop the code.
Scrappy:
When you see the seniors graduating from FSU right now, what’s their outlook?
Dr. Roger Webster:
Oh, they’re very excited about it. There’s a lot of opportunity in cyber security, all over the country and in computer programming as well. And I tell them all the time you complete your degree at FSW, a four year degree, even a two year degree, you will be instantly employable.
Scrappy:
That’s true. Absolutely.
Dr. Roger Webster:
It is.
Scrappy:
Randal, I was looking at your resume and says board member of Edison Pageant Of Light. That’s impressive. Can you tell us about it?
Randal Kendrix:
Oh, I absolutely love it. So when I first moved here, you’ve been in Florida long enough, you know the typical conversation is, Hey, where are you from? That’s how you start it off. And I had a tough time cause in Texas, everybody’s from Texas. So it’s more like, Hey, what town are you from? Kind of thing. So when I get here, there’s so many transplants, including myself, that finding local was very tough. And my wife who’s been here her entire life had so much and so many connections. There is a wonderful lady in town. Her name is Sue Grime. She’s an institution. If you’ve never met her, you need to, as my wife said, she roped us in.
So if you don’t know, Edison Pageant Of Lights is 80 something years old. It was in honor of Thomas Edison and he actually was there in the early days, giving out the diplomas. Actually her mother got her high school diploma from Thomas Edison and it’s a really beautiful homage to the Edison family. And then all the families in Florida for over 80 years, it’s in my opinion, one of the best local true long-term local things that you can learn and get to participate in Southwest Florida.
Scrappy:
Very nice, very nice. Any parting thoughts as far as selling Bid It, Bill It?
Randal Kendrix:
Well, there’s a lot of ways I’ve thought about going with it, but just me showing my heart out loud. I would love to build a large scale company and pull talent from people like Roger’s students. I would love to feed that college with just job, job, job. That would be a dream. That’s a dream of mine, I’d love to do that.
Scrappy:
That’s awesome. That’s really awesome. We’re sponsored by Content With Teeth, a creative content agency with over 20 years of experience right here in Southwest Florida. And as you can see by the Fathead, we do it really big, specializing in copywriting video production. If you want to sponsor The Come Up or be a guest, hit me up @heyscrappy on IG or text MIKE at 21000. I want to give a shout out to Mary Myers because Mary Myers put us all together today.
Dr. Roger Webster:
She’s the Dean of business and technology.
Scrappy:
Yeah. So Mary, thank you very much. We really appreciate that. And Randal, Roger it’s really, really awesome to talk to you guys today. I love what you’re doing. I appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit and I really love the fact that you’re doing it in Southwest Florida.
Randal Kendrix:
Thanks a lot Scrap. We appreciate your time.
Dr. Roger Webster:
Thanks Scrappy.
