Built by a contractor, not a software company

The short version

Planroom wasn’t built by a software company that discovered construction. It was built by a contractor who got tired of the paperwork.

I’m a preconstruction manager across three construction businesses: Foundation Construction Group (Walmart and retail construction), BR Concrete (commercial flatwork in the Atlanta market), and Prime 4 Services (an MBE government contracting firm). Before that, I was preconstruction director at Atlanta Concrete Company and at Place Services Inc., a general contractor. Over a 7-year career I’ve been directly awarded more than $100 million in work — which mostly means I’ve priced, papered, and argued about more scope changes than I can count, from both sides of the table: as the GC issuing them and as the sub submitting them.

Why Planroom exists

Two problems from my own jobs, honestly.

The change order chain. On work with one of our GC clients, keeping the CO chain straight — pricing the change, getting it approved, and getting the backup documentation to the client in a form they’d accept — was a constant, expensive mess. Email threads, spreadsheet pricing, missing signatures, and a log that only got reconciled when someone forced it. We were doing eight-figure volume and running changes like it was 1998.

Plan distribution. Getting current drawings to the field and to our subs and vendors — and knowing who was still building off the old set — was the other daily fight. That problem is literally why this product is called Planroom.

I looked for a tool that solved both without an enterprise contract and a sales call, didn’t find one at a price a normal contractor would pay, and built it. (It’s not my first: I’m also behind ScopeTakeoff, estimating software contractors use every day.)

What that means for the product

• It’s priced like a tool, not a platform sale. $100/month, published, monthly, cancel anytime — because that’s what I’d be willing to pay.
• It’s self-serve. No demo gate, no onboarding project. If a foreman can’t figure it out on a phone, we failed.
• It’s opinionated about the record. Signatures, time-stamps, audit trails, and logs that tie out — because the record is what gets you paid and keeps you out of disputes.

What we write here

Every guide on this site — on change orders, submittals, RFIs, and document control — is written and reviewed from real preconstruction experience, not scraped from other blogs. Where something is a rule of thumb, we say so. Where your contract governs, we say that too.