Experienced technical help without layers of handoffs

Jean M. Barnett founded SDSI Business Systems in San Diego in 1984 on a straightforward conviction: small and mid-sized construction companies deserved estimating tools every bit as serious as the ones the big firms used.

She did not just run the company—she built the software. Jean took a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University in 1964 and a degree in Data Processing from Coleman College in San Diego in 1968, where her computer career began. She spent roughly the next ten years as a programmer and analyst for companies across several industries—work that taught her how businesses actually run day to day, and what software has to do to be useful to them.

She traces that instinct to build things to her father. Patrick T. Marotta was born in Italy in 1907 and came to New Jersey as a child; after the crash of 1929 took his parents’ dress factory, he turned toward the thing that fascinated him most. He learned to fly, built his own airplane, studied aeronautical engineering at the Casey Jones Academy of Aeronautics, and in 1943 founded Marotta Controls. Roughly 220 patents carry his name.

Jean grew up watching an inventor treat a hard problem as something you sit down and solve, and she set out to do the same in a medium of her own. Where her father built machines, she would build software—and she meant to do it as an inventor, a programmer, and the owner of the company. She became all three.

She bought an Apple II in 1978 and saw straight away what a machine like it could do for a small business. By 1979 she was living in San Diego with her two sons and that computer. Her first client, Marty Kiley, published construction-estimating cost books, and he encouraged her to turn it into a working estimating program. That program is where SDSI’s construction-estimating business begins.

Jean built SDSI to be family-owned and operated, and she stayed at the keyboard—writing, shipping, and supporting the programs her customers depended on. Both of her sons went on to graduate from Coleman College themselves and became active in the business.

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Jean worked in Visual Basic from its very first release. When the tools she needed did not yet exist, she adopted them at version 1.0—back when they arrived on floppy disks—and built on them for decades.

“I have been an active Visual Basic developer since Visual Basic 1.0 was released.”

SDSI’s construction-estimating work grew through a series of products and publishing partnerships. In 1995 the company began a long collaboration with HomeTech, developing a Windows estimating application built on licensed residential cost data, and its systems generated on-demand cost books tailored to local markets—work later rebuilt on a modern platform covering more than 200 local areas.

Today SDSI remains independently and privately held, and still family-run: Jean’s son Patrick Thomas became its primary owner and Chief Executive Officer in 2024, and Jean stays involved part-time as Chair of the Board. The flagship, Rapid Estimator, carries forward the mission she started in 1984: professional-grade estimating software for the small and mid-sized contractors who build America’s homes and businesses, backed by the same hands-on support the company has offered from the beginning.