I asked Kevin and Mark what their boyhood version of success looked like. I laughed 😆
If these two midwestern boys had their ways, their divergent stories would be a cinema-quality plot. Oh, it’d be an All-American-Pie story all right, minus the chevys and levees. It’d be the sparkle in an old-timer's eye… a reminder that miracles can still happen on 34th street, the American Dream is still alive, and the moon is just waiting for some cowboy to lasso it down for a pretty girl.
The movie would open with Kevin Corwin growing up among farms in nowhere Kansas surrounded by waves of windswept, amber grain. He fixes the kind of fences born of a combination of bad luck and true grit. He saves extra nickels from his main street lemonade stand, marries his high-school sweetheart named Dorothy, graduates top-of-his-class from Harvard, and becomes the youngest astronaut ever accepted into NASA. He’d have the honor to be the first American astronaut to repair a decommissioned Soviet satellite for humanitarian work overseas.
After an intermission, the camera would pan to Mark Meyer growing up in Saint Louis, baseball glove in hand. He plays backyard ball in a sandlot, goes to college to play ball, and gets noticed by a Cardinals scout. He skips the minor leagues, signs straight to the major leagues, and spends his down time in the off-season moonlighting as Eddie Van Halen’s backup guitarist. The closing shot is a fade with their two officially licensed bobbleheads next to each other on a store shelf (the closest they ever get to meeting).
Great stories, right? Except, the real story of Kevin and Mark doesn’t involve NASA, the Cardinals, or Eddie Van Halen. Rather than becoming an astronaut or ball player, they both found STEM content in high school, and eventually became engineers.
The real story starts with a shared problem and the stubborn belief they could do better ✅
While they might not have built the solution in their garage, it is a true story of American ingenuity. Let’s rewind the clock to 2019.
Kevin is driving down I-64 in Chesterfield when his phone starts chirping. He answers quickly. The man on the other end of the line introduces himself as Mark Meyer. Mark had been referred to Kevin by a mutual acquaintance since (apparently) Kevin knows all the latest and greatest project management softwares. He politely asks if Kevin knows of any softwares which can accomplish some of his professional consulting objectives. In turn, Kevin politely gives him some suggestions, and the call is terminated.
Kevin keeps driving. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, eyes drifting into the distance. Earlier that day, and every day in his professional working life since taking an intro Logistics class ten years earlier, Kevin had been frustrated by software blindspots he recommended in his consultant practice. Sure, there were ones that did most of what he wanted, but they cost $100,000 a year to license… putting them out of reach of 99% of small businesses and clients. So frustrating.
He wanted fundamental scope, schedule, and costs easily connected rather than separated 🔗 But such software did not exist.
Instead, he had to search for softwares which were highly configurable, letting him set them up in less confusing and more practical ways.
When Mark hung up the phone, he stood up. He walked over to the window of his office and crossed his arms, letting an exasperated breath leave his lungs in a great sigh. Closing his eyes, he muttered, “I just want to run my projects without getting a degree in software development.” And, snapping back into engineer-mode, he tried some of the softwares Kevin had suggested.
A few days later Mark called Kevin back. Kevin asked him what he thought of the softwares and Mark said they weren’t what he was looking for. That’s when Mark asked the pioneering question:
“Have you ever thought of building your own?” 👨💻
To which Kevin instantly replied, “Every day of my working life.”
So, the seeds for InScope were sown. A business lunch followed in which the broad objectives of this brave, new software were clarified:
- Simplicity
- Solve the basic problem
- Make it work like all-too common spreadsheets
- Scope, schedule, and cost are connected rather than isolated
- One-click easy navigation
- Project owners and the service providers they hire come together
- Help people have successful projects
Four years later, the beta version is here. Both Kevin and Mark are professional service providers who own consulting firms. They live and breathe this stuff, folks. Their pain points (cost, simplicity, configurability) are your pain points. They built the software they always wanted to use. And, for the last year, they’ve been using it as guinea pigs. They’ve run their entire businesses off this platform, and loved it.
Mark was gobsmacked when he had the realization that there was zero (zilch, nada) softwares which looked like the scope and fee sheets which were used by him and engineers everywhere. He said it “blew his little brain away”. In the trillion dollar capital building industry, he had been cobbling together a mixture of spreadsheets and softwares just like everyone else. But, he remembers the first day he experienced the power of InScope. After transferring all of his projects, he knew exactly how much was remaining in his budget as of that MORNING. He didn’t have to wait six weeks for accounting to get back with him before they would tell him he was perilously over-budget.
Kevin’s first experience with InScope was at home. He was sitting there expanding and collapsing sockets, checking out scope elements, and audibly shouted “This is so cool!” He called his wife into the room, who has no background in engineering, to explain the intricacies of why the software was so awesome. She agreed.
They might not have become licensed bobbleheads, but what Mark and Kevin have accomplished together is no less impressive:
- Engineers can spend less time on project management, and more time fixing problems 🔨
- Data is properly and instantly related for dramatically improved project clarity and outcomes 💵
- No need for special reports from accounting 🌲
- A simple interface where scope, schedule, and cost are connected rather than isolated 🔗
- No wasted clicks 🖱️
- Less hassle 😤
- Total flexibility
To find out what all the fuss is about, sign up for a trial today for only $24/user/month. A price that amounts to less than two billable hours per YEAR for most firms making the tool affordable to any size company. We are so positive you will benefit from using it, we are offering a whole month trial for free with no credit card required to start. Sign up today!