Three generations of steel behind one piece of software. One trade, two brothers, plans in and bid proposal out.
It started with Vince's father, who founded Hughes and Associates, a steel erection company that grew to run up to 160 ironworkers. Vince became an ironworker apprentice at 17 and went to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory for three years. His father started the company just one year before Vince broke out to become a journeyman, but he would not let him quit. Old school through and through: apprentices do not quit.
Once Vince earned his journeyman card, he went to work for his father. Not as the boss's son with a silver spoon, but as the red-headed stepchild who had to earn the respect of every man on the job. After 17 years of proving himself in the field, working up from foreman to general foreman, at 34 his father brought him into the office in 1999 and taught him estimating the old-school way.
By 2001, Vince moved to digital takeoffs, building his own Excel-based estimating tool, the Steel Erection Bid Wizard. After selling the company in 2012, he saw a gap in the market: there was no estimating software built specifically for steel erectors. So he put the Bid Wizard on the market. Over 400 licenses have sold to steel erection contractors nationwide since 2015, and erectors have built more than 45,000 bids on it.
Now the story continues with Alex, Vince's son, a computer science student obsessed with AI who has spent the last year building the Steel Erection AI Takeoff Wizard from the ground up. Everything Vince's father passed down through decades of steel erection, Vince is now pouring into Alex, who is turning it into AI-powered software. Alex is building his own company, North Star AI Solutions, and this is his foundation.
Three generations. The grandfather who built the company. The father who learned the trade, mastered estimating, and created the tools. The son who is taking all of that knowledge and building the future. That is the story behind every line of code in this software.
Vince HughesSteel Estimating Solutions
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