Faster takeoffs.
Faster estimates.
More jobs won.

Left school at 16 for a building apprenticeship. Started Base Construction, then helped start Freedom Built and Base Property Group, now building 90-odd homes a year across Canterbury. I’ve seen the estimating problem from every seat in the business.

The same numbers get re-entered into four or five different systems. Senior estimators spend half their week on data entry instead of judgment calls, and the tribal knowledge sits with one or two people. When they leave, it walks out the door with them.

Even on holiday I’ll be the one driving past every construction site to see what’s going on. Once you’ve been on the tools and behind the chequebook, you can’t switch it off.

Best way to sum it up is taking side quests: entrepreneur, professional American football athlete, Army, lectured at AUT.

The cost to build is so high. The culture in NZ is so fixated that home ownership is tied to your value, that by us lowering the cost to build we’ll have a bigger impact.

To absorb an astronomical amount of pain and stress and still perform.

What didn’t I do? Army Special Ops, IT, Deloitte management consulting, lecturing, and now AI agents at scale. On the surface it looks random, but I was following a very specific lead, picking up depth in different areas along the way.

The manual nature of the process and the corresponding waste. I’m an efficiency fanatic, and I love fixing anything wasteful. Residential construction lags significantly in efficiency compared to other industries.

I am a master synthesiser. It’s definitely not the first impression I give.

I’ve worked in technology since I dropped out of school at 17: desktop support and systems engineering, fault management at TelstraClear, first IT Manager at Serato, then DevOps and developer experience at SiteMinder and Digital Asset in Sydney.

The time it takes to get costings on plan variations. Building our own home, every design change kicked off its own QS cycle and added days, and one came back a week later, wrong. That gap between a change and a reliable number is what I want gone.

Sleep. I can do it anywhere, and I function surprisingly well on very little when required.

A complicated CV: international development with Maasai groups, a stint as a commercial lawyer, Salesforce in London on data privacy, then five years in the public service doing community engagement, research, and policy.

The same set of building plans gets processed upward of forty-plus times. It’s slowing down construction, slowing down people getting into their homes, ultimately slowing down the whole economy. The signal’s been so clear that this is ready to be disrupted.

Going from knowing absolutely nothing about something to obsessing over it 24 hours a day for months on end, until I’ve built an understanding that can ‘appear’ quite deep.

A 20-year career at Ricoh, jointly managing sales strategy and execution across New Zealand, with direct leadership of four branches and 70 employees. Inaugural graduate of the Asia Pacific Compass Leadership Programme, and oversaw an APAC AI programme spanning 11 operating companies.

Success is about hearing how pleased our customers are and knowing we’ve made a huge impact on their long-term success. The Takeoff solution is clearly a painkiller, and that’s exciting to offer customers.

Trust is built through reliability, credibility and a strong relationship. Simple.

Thirteen years in the building merchant trade. Started as a yard boy and worked through to estimator, then commercial account manager, then new business development manager, so I’ve seen both the estimating side and the customer side of construction from the inside.

A build runs in a straight line (concept to spade in the ground to finished home) and there are a hundred ways it gets disrupted. We hold the key to one of the earliest constraints: estimating lead times. Ease that and the holdups downstream flow more freely.

I played rhythm guitar in a semi-successful band called Dusty Sunday through uni. We’re on Spotify, if you go looking.

Fabricating for an aluminium window and door factory, then I resigned and started a marketing automation agency. I ran my own business for a few months, until a two-minute chat with Brad ended with him hiring me.

The amount of wasted time and resource it takes to get a quantity estimate done. That time can go into the real problems instead: designing the home, and the actual construction.

Golf.

Software developer after uni, then IT management, though with small teams, so I was still writing code, which is my preference. I also completed a building and construction course and worked as a builder for a couple of years.

Estimating still runs on spreadsheets built from tribal knowledge and epic formulas that are hard to change or improve.

Cooking and building. I love both.

Computer Science at the University of Canterbury, working as a hiking guide on the Great Walks of Fiordland before and during uni. After that I walked Te Araroa (the length of New Zealand), which did a lot for my resilience and adaptability.

Quoting takes days. People with real industry knowledge end up stuck filling out spreadsheets instead of using what they actually know. That’s the bit worth fixing.

I’ve walked the length of New Zealand: Te Araroa, around 3,000km.

I dropped out of university to pursue opportunities in software. Started with a summer internship doing data annotation, then found myself building tools to help the process and the team. My work was noticed, and leading the annotation team and building projects is what I live in now.

How long it takes to turn around a quote. A builder can lose a job because someone else gets their price in first. When estimating no longer takes days you get the number back fast, win more work, and stop putting so much pressure on the small team that knows how to do it properly.

I’m a very fast reader. People are quite surprised when they see how fast I read.

Co-founding several design studios, then 15 years co-founding a retail sales training company. Lots of hats: design, strategy, filming, editing, marketing, branding, financial accounts, directorship, through to selling out.

The buzz of software solving real problems for real people, and then, with a design hat on, making it look great and work great.

Growing organic fruit and vegetables, and stringing tennis rackets.

I’ve trialled a few different jobs since coming to NZ to gain different experiences and perspectives, but my main love remains marketing.

There’s a lot of guesswork in this industry, using experience alone to estimate things. That knowledge is great, but data is key. It needs to be captured and used to improve systems across the board.

Harry Potter.

Around 18 years as a QS and estimator for residential companies, group home builders, high-end architectural firms and transportable prefab home builders. Before that, the sport and rec industry in Perth.

The time it takes to put an estimate together. We all get the same plans and measure the same way, but there’s nearly always someone with a different answer, and that comes down to how the data is entered and measured.

Delivering under pressure. It’s my best secret because I don’t tend to show it on the outside.