About The Author

Stephen Carr is the President and Chief Estimator at Carr Consulting Services. He has been in the electrical construction industry since 1971, and has been an estimator and project manager since 1980. His spent his first seven years at a wholesale house. For the next two years he was employed as a purchasing agent for the Los Angeles office of the second largest electrical contractor in the nation. This experience gave him an extensive base of knowledge regarding electrical materials. To learn the other side of electrical work, he visited job sites regularly to obtain first hand knowledge of labor and installations. He was a well rounded estimator by the time his training was finished.

Early in his career, he became interested in more complex work, which led to a preference for difficult projects. This experience led to bidding and winning some very interesting and important projects. It also led to two N.E.C.A. Awards of Excellence – McDonnell Douglas’ C17 Facility and the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance.

In 1985, he was written up in the Electrical Contractor Magazine for his use of computers. That article helped launch Carr Consulting Services. With the blessing of his employer, he provided computer set-up and training on weekends. In February of 1994, He made Carr Consulting a full time, nation-wide, estimating and project management firm.  Steve  provides personal, hands-on supervision of all estimators and reviews every product provided by Carr Consulting.

His ability to decipher complex projects turned out to be very good for the company. The first projects awarded to Carr Consulting were waste water treatment plants, subway terminal and track projects, and extensive bridge rehab work. This continues today, with 70% of our work being difficult, complex, puzzle-solving projects. Our estimators feel that it can actually be a nice break when an easy project comes along.

Steve has been using personal computers and estimating software since the Apple II computer came out. His first estimating software was McCormick’s on the Apple II. With 48k of memory, a 9″ green screen and dual 5-1/4″ 1 sided floppy drives, he was in computing heaven. Things sure have changed!

Carr Consulting Services works to stay on top of all new technologies that could be beneficial to our industry. This led to our adoption of the PlanSwift Digital Takeoff system in November of 2007. We immediately started saving our customers shipping and printing costs, as paper documents were no longer required.

Steve has also been teaching electrical estimating since 1985. Carr Consulting currently offers in-office and online electrical estimating courses. We have had great success with these courses, and their popularity continues to rise.

Another part of Steve’s background was the adoption of CPM scheduling software in the mid-1980′s. This type of work is being required more often of electrical contractors these days. We provide fully cost and man-hour loaded CPM schedules using SureTrak from Primavera. The files from this software are compatible with Primavera’s industry standard P-Series scheduling software.

Steve has attended many seminars along the way to improve his skills, including courses on change orders, claims management, project management and personel management. He also went back to college for two years, attending classes in advanced electronics and digital logic.

Thanks for taking the time to read this page. We look forward to hearing from you.