Built by a Roofer Who Taught Himself to Code

Chaz wasn't supposed to be a software engineer. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the kind of kid who learned how things worked by taking them apart, starting with his parents' computer. He broke it. Then, terrified, spent the next two days figuring out how to fix it. That cycle, break something, understand it, rebuild it better, became the pattern for everything he'd do later.

No college. No bootcamp. No mentor handing him a roadmap. He learned to code the hard way: late nights after work, Stack Overflow tabs open in the dozens, building projects that crashed and fixing them until they didn't. He wrestled with his own computers, his own servers, his own deployments, every failure was a lesson, and he never stopped.

Meanwhile, he was running a roofing business. Climbing ladders. Negotiating with adjusters. And every single day, facing the same soul-crushing bottleneck: manually retyping insurance scopes into Xactimate, line by line.

If you've ever sat down with a 50-line adjuster scope and a copy of Xactimate on a Windows desktop, you know the drill. Open the estimate. Read line one. Find the code. Type it in. Set the quantity. Move to line two. Repeat, for every single line. Hope you didn't fat-finger a code or miss a unit price that eats your margin.

Chaz did this for years. Hours of his life, lost to data entry, time he could've spent selling more jobs, managing crews, or just being home before dark. Every roofer knows this pain. Every adjuster knows it. But nobody had fixed it.

So he decided to fix it himself.

The first version of ESXPress was ugly. It barely worked. It probably crashed every third upload. But Chaz kept at it, writing code after the roofing jobs were done, sometimes until 3 AM, iterating on PDF parsing logic that could pull line items from carrier scopes and map them to Xactimate codes automatically.

The breakthrough came when he realized this wasn't just his problem. Every contractor he talked to said the same thing: “I'd pay for that.” What started as a script to save himself time became a product that could save an entire industry from the drudgery of manual scope entry.

Today, ESXPress converts insurance scopes, carrier PDFs and scope XML exports, to Xactimate ESX files in minutes. It uses AI to map line items, calculate real-time profit, generate denial responses with IRC citations, and even analyze jobsite photos for damage, all from a browser. No desktop software. No manual typing. Just upload and go.