We'll do the takeoff for you.

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.

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.

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.

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.