Forty-six years in the field, and the software to match

The short version, and how to check it before you read any further

Timothy Parks. Clermont, Lake County, Central Florida. Two current Florida contractor licences: CBC059592, Certified Building Contractor, and CCC1327217, Certified Roofing Contractor. Forty-six years in construction. I also wrote the software my contracting business runs on.

Both licence numbers are public record. Put either into the Florida DBPR licence search and you will see the status, the name attached and the expiry date, without asking me for anything.

Do that first. Everything below this line is me telling you about myself, which is the least reliable category of information on any website. The two numbers above are the only part a stranger can verify, and they are the part I would want if I were you.

I would also suggest running the same search on whoever else you are considering. It takes a minute and the results are occasionally surprising.

What forty-six years actually teaches, and what it does not

Experience is the most overclaimed thing in this trade, so let me be exact about what the number buys and what it does not.

It does not mean I have seen everything. Anyone who tells you that has stopped paying attention. Materials change, codes change, and the failure that catches you is nearly always the one you had decided you understood.

What it does mean is that I have watched the same failures repeat across four decades, and I can usually tell which ones are genuinely new and which are an old problem wearing a new material. Most are the second kind. A product marketed as maintenance-free is a product whose maintenance has been deferred into a failure mode nobody has named yet, and you learn to hear that in the sales language before you see it on a roof.

It means I remember what the code required in each era rather than having to look it up, because I had to build to it as it arrived. In Florida that matters more than it would elsewhere, because the requirements here were rewritten in response to storms that exposed what the previous requirements permitted, and they were rewritten more than once. A house built lawfully in one decade can be non-compliant today and entirely compliant with the rules that governed it. Knowing the difference is not an archival exercise for me.

And it means I have been wrong in public. I have had work questioned, had to explain a decision made on a roof in weather to someone reading about it in an office, and paid to put things right. That is the part of a long career nobody puts on a website, and it is the part that actually changes how you work. A contractor who has never eaten a mistake prices risk differently from one who has.

The honest limit: forty-six years is owner-stated. It is not a certification and there is no registry that will confirm it for you. The licences are the checkable part; the years are me telling you something. Weight them accordingly.

Why I still hold the licences

Keeping two certifications current costs money, continuing education, and the ongoing possibility of being answerable for work. Plenty of people in my position let them lapse and describe themselves as a consultant.

I keep them because the moment I stop, everything on this site becomes a story about something I used to do. There is a real difference between a person who holds a licence and a person who held one, and the difference shows up precisely when it matters: under cross-examination, in front of an inspector, or in the moment a homeowner asks whether the thing you just recommended is something you would be willing to sign for.

It is also the honest constraint on my capacity. A contractor still running jobs cannot serve unlimited clients. I would rather that limit be visible on the way in than discovered together in month three.

⚠️ Both licences carry a renewal date, and a licence is only meaningful while it is current. If you are reading this some time after it was written, the DBPR search will tell you the truth faster than this page will.

Why a contractor ended up writing software

Not because I saw a market. Because I had a problem and nothing I could buy addressed it.

Every system sold to contractors models the job the way an accountant sees it: a quote, an invoice, a payment. But the money in this business is decided in the parts between those events. The decking nobody knew was rotten until the tear-off. The inspector who wants a detail the plan does not show. The crew that finishes early and could start the next job today if anyone knew which one was ready.

Software written from outside handles the tidy path and collapses at exactly those points. So you end up with a spreadsheet alongside it, then a second spreadsheet, then the real schedule lives in somebody's head and the expensive system becomes a place you type things afterwards so a report looks right.

I built mine to fix that, for me, in my own business. It grew from there. Two things about it are worth stating publicly because most systems cannot say either:

Every outbound contact path routes a compliance gate that fails closed. If the system cannot confirm a person may lawfully be contacted, nothing is sent — not a warning, not a queue somebody clears in bulk. It will occasionally refuse a call I was entitled to make. That is the correct trade.

Tenant data is isolated with per-tenant secret storage — a boundary in the architecture rather than a filter in a query that one person can get wrong once.

I am not going to describe the rest of it here, and that is deliberate. The interesting parts of a working system are the parts a competitor would like enumerated.

What actually changed in forty-six years

People expect the answer to be materials. Materials changed least.

The code changed most, and it changed in response to failure. Requirements here were rewritten after storms exposed what the previous requirements allowed — deck attachment, roof-to-wall connection, opening protection, secondary water barrier. Each revision is a list of things that broke. You can read the building code as a history of what the weather taught, and once you have built through several versions of it you stop treating it as bureaucracy.

Insurance became a party to the work. Early on, what an insurer thought about a roof was somebody else's problem. Now it shapes what gets specified, what documentation has to exist, and sometimes whether a homeowner can keep coverage at all. A contractor who does not understand what an underwriter is looking at is a contractor who leaves clients exposed while doing technically sound work.

Information moved to the customer's side, and that is genuinely good. A homeowner today can look up a licence, read the code, watch someone install the exact detail on their roof, and get three opinions before lunch. Some contractors resent this. I think it is the best thing that has happened to the trade, because it punishes exactly the behaviour that made the trade's reputation. The people it hurts are the ones who were relying on you not knowing.

What did not change: water finds the seam, the cheapest bid is usually cheap for a reason that will present later, and the job is decided by whether someone did the boring part properly when nobody was watching. Four decades and those three have not moved an inch.

And one thing got worse. The volume of confident, wrong advice has multiplied, because producing it costs nothing now. A great deal of what a homeowner reads about Florida roofs was written for hail country by someone who has never been on one. That is why this site keeps saying to verify things rather than asking you to trust it — the ability to check is the only defence against a market where anyone can sound authoritative.

Why everything gets documented, and why that is unusual

Most contractors document to satisfy someone else. I document because the alternative failed.

The discipline is simple to state and tedious to keep: every observation carries the date it was made, not the date the document was written. Photographs keep their original metadata rather than being exported and re-saved, because a photograph without a timestamp is a photograph whose date becomes a matter of testimony instead of record. Anything physical has its handling recorded as it happens, not reconstructed afterwards from memory.

That sounds like litigation preparation, and it is useful there, but it started somewhere more ordinary. If you cannot prove what a roof looked like before you touched it, then every pre-existing problem in that house is arguably now yours. If you cannot show what was installed, a warranty question four years later becomes a negotiation about whose memory is better. Neither of those is a legal problem until it is, and by then the evidence either exists or it does not.

It is also the reason the software exists in the form it does. A system that records work in a way that survives a hostile reading is a different system from one that records work so a report looks tidy, and you cannot bolt the first onto the second afterwards. The discipline had to be in the tool from the start, which is a large part of why nothing I could buy was going to do it.

The side effect is that when an attorney asks how I know something, the answer is rarely “I remember.” That is worth more than any credential on this page.

What I will not do

This is the most useful section on the page, and I would read the equivalent one on anybody else's site first if they had the nerve to write it.

I will not quote a job I have not seen. A number produced without looking is either padded for the worst case or destined to change, and you will not know which until it is too late to matter.

I will not handle an insurance claim on your behalf. That is a licensed activity in Florida which I do not hold. I document conditions and give opinions; I do not adjust, and I will not blur that line however the conversation is framed.

I will not tell you a repair is a replacement because the replacement is worth more to me. If a repair will do, that is what you will hear, and it is worth asking yourself how many contractors have told you that this year.

I will not reach a conclusion I was retained to reach. In expert work, if what I find hurts the case, the person paying me hears it first, privately, and early enough to do something about it.

I will not promise you results I do not control — not a ranking, not a lead volume, not an insurance outcome. Anyone offering you those is describing their sales process.

And I will not publish a client's name, job or words without their permission. Which is why this site carries no testimonial wall. I would rather have an empty section than a fabricated one, and you should apply that test to every site you visit today.

Three separate things, kept separate on purpose

People find me through three different doors and they want genuinely different things, so the work is kept apart rather than blended into one pitch.

Homeowners want work done on a building. That is contracting, it is what the licences cover, and it is the oldest of the three.

Attorneys and adjusters want an opinion that survives scrutiny. Different buyer, different deliverable, different standard — the product is a report and testimony, not a roof.

Contractors want the systems. That grew out of running the first thing and needing tools that did not exist.

They inform each other, which is the whole point. The software knows what a change order does to a schedule because a change order is doing it to my schedule this week. The expert work is credible because the licences are current. The contracting is more disciplined because the documentation was built to survive a hostile reading.

What I try not to do is let one of them borrow credibility it has not earned. Forty-six years of roofing does not make me a software authority, and writing good software does not make me right about your roof. Where they genuinely overlap I will say so; where they do not, I would rather send you elsewhere.

Where I work, and why that is a short list

Central Florida. Clermont and Lake County outward. My licences are Florida licences, and the standard of care I can speak to is the one I have practised under.

There is a version of this page that claims a wider service area because a wider area sounds more successful. It would be a mistake. A contractor who will drive three hours for a job is a contractor who will be three hours away when something needs putting right — and something always does, eventually.

This is a wind region, not a hail region, and that shapes what is worth specifying here. Uplift, attachment and opening protection carry weight in Florida that they do not carry in a hail market, and advice imported from one to the other arrives confidently at the wrong answer. The humidity does the slow damage: anything that gets wet behind a surface stays wet, so the interval between an intrusion and visible evidence is longer here than most literature assumes.

What happens when I get it wrong

Nobody puts this on a website, which is exactly why it is worth reading.

I have been wrong about a roof. I have specified something that did not perform the way I expected, misjudged what was under a surface, and given a number that turned out to be light. Anyone in this trade for four decades who tells you otherwise is either not counting or not telling you.

What I can tell you is what happens next, because that is the part you are actually buying. You hear it from me, not from a discovery three weeks later. You hear what it will cost to put right and who is carrying that cost, in the same conversation. And if it is mine to carry, I carry it — which is one of the practical reasons the licences stay current, because a licensed contractor is answerable in a way that a person with a truck is not.

The documentation discipline connects directly to this. When you can show what was there before you started, what was installed, and when, a problem becomes a conversation about facts rather than a contest between two memories. That protects a client from me as much as it protects me from a client, and it is the only version of this that works over a long career.

Ask any contractor you are considering what happens when they are wrong. Not whether — what happens. The answer, and how fast it arrives, tells you more than any gallery of finished projects.

How to judge me, and anyone else

Run the licence number. Ask what they will talk you out of. Ask them to show you a consent record rather than a lead record. Ask what happens when they are wrong.

Notice whether the answers contain any limits at all. A person who does everything, serves everywhere, and has never had a job go badly is describing a marketing position rather than a career.

Then decide. If what is on this page is what you are looking for, tell me what you need and roughly when. If it is not, I would genuinely rather you found that out here than three weeks into a job.

The form below reaches me directly, and so does the phone number at the top of this page.

Common questions