You could say it was the cataracts that changed Paul Xuereb’s life for the better. Not directly, of course. Paul is an electrical estimator in Sydney, Australia, and vision problems meant he was having a difficult time doing his job: he was struggling to see the detail on architectural drawings. To cope, he found himself involved in a laborious process of taking snapshots of the drawings and placing those snapshots into an Excel file. Somebody noticed Paul struggling to piece together a way to view his drawings and asked him, “Why don’t you try Bluebeam Revu?” He listened. “I think it’s the best thing I ever did,” Paul says. “Bluebeam has been my savior.”

With little in the way of formal training, Paul mastered Revu. If estimation is the art of counting details, then every little detail counts. Revu, Paul says, can “speed dial the jobs. For instance, for scale: All I do is find a doorway, I lay out the width of that doorway, and boom, the drawing’s been calibrated.” No more scale rulers and wheels and manual contortions. And the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities in Revu keep improving, which means instead of having to physically read everything, Paul can now rely on the software to find things for him. On a large job, where there can be hundreds of thousands of documents, that’s a huge boon.

I did one job, I think I counted 5,000 power points in one scan in Revu. What would be the time to physically count 5,000 power points?

Paul has increasingly found that Revu is the engine that powers his business, and not merely a tool. “It went from something that helped me do my job, to something that’s making me money. I’m getting stuff done I’ve never thought possible. I did one job, I think I counted 5,000 power points in one scan in Revu. What would be the time to physically count 5,000 power points? Even just counting to 5,000, how long would that take you?” He used to count with a clicker in his hand. “Click, click, click,” he said. Where’s the accuracy in that?

After a successful surgery, Paul’s eyes are fine. But he’s not about to go back to the old way of doing things. “I’m getting a lot of praise from people who are just amazed at what I can do with Revu.” He uses the tool every day, with the added benefit of not having to worry about mountains of paper making it difficult to find things. I can get hundreds and hundreds of drawings and put them all on my laptop, do all my print ups, do all my mark ups, do everything I need to do without printing one piece of paper. That’s just amazing.” Revu provided a boost that allowed Paul to stake out on his own and start his own estimating business, PMX Electrical Estimating. You might even say that Revu has become a sort of partner in the new venture. As Paul tells it, “Bluebeam is on my business card.”