EstimateOne is laying foundations for big growth

This Melbourne construction tech business has witnessed the local startup scene blossom.

Michael Ashcroft had a simple goal when he founded construction tech business EstimateOne –to make his own job less boring.

It was 2008 and he was working as a cadet estimator at commercial construction company Kane. His job involved spending weeks manually contacting hundreds of subcontractors for quotes to work out the overall costs of big building projects.

“It used to cost a fortune; it took a long time. And as a probably naive, know-it-all 25-year-old, I thought, ‘We should just do this on the internet, that would be way easier,’” Michael said.

He and co-founder Andrew Ritchie got to work developing a digital tendering platform that would let construction firms procure services from a range of suppliers and manage project documents online, instead of having to post out countless physical building plans.

When they started, nobody had really heard of the term “software as a service” and incubator and accelerator programs were thin on the ground in Victoria.

The duo’s first connections with other founders came from a stint at Melbourne co-working space The Cluster, where other early-stage companies were starting to work alongside each other.

“Some of that time was helpful, some of it was just fun. There was a shared sense that everyone was trying to build something of their own together, and things were much less lonely,” Michael said.

“It was great, because until that point we had just been in our spare bedrooms.”

Ambitions grow with the ecosystem

Over the years EstimateOne has had a front row seat to the explosion of Victoria’s startup ecosystem and the benefits of being surrounded by other successful founders.

The state has seen several successful startup exits in recent years, including the sale of construction project management business Aconex, which was snapped up by Oracle in 2018 for $1.6 billion.

EstimateOne now counts Aconex co-founder Leigh Jasper among its investors, after he partnered with Potentia Capital in 2022 on a $35 million capital raise.

Witnessing the success of other businesses has helped to shape EstimateOne’s ambitions.

“Not only was it comforting, but it was also a slight accelerant on your own performance,” Michael said.

When EstimateOne launched, it was focused purely on the Victorian construction market. These days it has a global perspective and big international expansion plans, thanks largely to the examples set by other local businesses.

“Now, everyone knows you should have an international growth plan immediately. I think we could have expanded faster if we were starting out today,” Michael said.

Building a world-class team

As EstimateOne grew into a scale-up business, its founders started to consider how to reshape the company for the next stage of growth.

That process involved taking themselves out of some of the day-to-day operations and recruiting a strong executive team.

“It was about professionalising the business and getting it ready for its next big growth spurt,” Michael explained.

In 2021, Chris Dobbyn was appointed the chief executive of EstimateOne after several years in senior roles at companies like Aconex and REA Group.

EstimateOne already has countless runs on the board, having helped 45,000 companies tender for more than $300 billion worth of construction work since launch more than 15 years ago.

But the company’s executive team is still refining its strategy for the next chapter.

Earlier this year Chris Dobbyn and other senior company leaders participated in LaunchVic’s 30X30 program, which aims to equip the state’s future unicorns with the skills to navigate the scaleup phase.

30X30 connected EstimateOne with mentors from multi-billion-dollar companies like Culture Amp, SEEK and Xero, who helped review the scale-up’s growth strategy and simplify its goals.

Jodie Auster, the current strategic advisor to Uber’s global chief executive, also introduced the team to the ‘Strategy Cascade’, a business decision making framework made famous by strategy experts A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin in their book Playing to Win.

EstimateOne has been referring to the model when working on long-term planning.

Having made steady progress rolling out the platform in the UK and Ireland, the business has started to look at Western Europe and North America, too.

“Chris opened our offsite meeting the other week by saying: ‘We’ve doubled our business over the last three years, and we’re aiming to do that again in the next two.’ The metric of success will be achieving that.”