Cole Askew

Co-founder

Backstory

Where did you grow up?

Christchurch, New Zealand.

What did your parents do, and what did you take from them?

Dad’s a property developer — that’s where I got the value of hard work, renovating houses in my teenage years. Mum runs a home-staging business — that’s where I got the compassion for people. Plenty of both still gets used in this job.

What did you spend the most time on as a kid?

Sports and side hustles. Always something on, always something I was building or selling.

What did you do before TakeoffQS?

Left school at 16 to start a building apprenticeship. Then started Base Construction — a concrete construction business covering residential, commercial and civil work. From there I was part of starting both Freedom Built and Base Property Group, where we now build 90-odd homes a year across Canterbury alongside the wider development group. Years on the tools, years building a concrete business from scratch, then years running a residential builder and developer before I got to TakeoffQS — which means I’ve seen the estimating problem from every seat in the business.

How did you end up at TakeoffQS?

Brad Fraser and I have worked closely for years — he sits on our board and is the person I stress-test the bigger calls with. We kept circling back to the same conversation: where does the next real productivity wedge in residential building actually come from. The honest answer was the part of the business neither of us was fixing — take-off and estimating. Brad and Brett’s side had the AI capability, our side had a live builder running every problem we’d want to solve, and the chemistry between the founders was already there. TakeoffQS came out of that.

What I care about

What’s broken in estimating that you want to fix?

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. As-built data never feeds back into the next quote, so the same mistakes get re-priced again. And the tribal knowledge sits with one or two people — when they leave, it walks out the door with them. None of that gives a builder real productivity, and it’s a big part of why margins keep getting squeezed even when volume is fine.

What do you look for in the companies we work with?

Builders who care about throughput, not just cost. They’ve usually hit a wall — they know the way they price doesn’t scale, and they’re tired of relying on one person to hold it all together. Mid-tier residential builders pushing toward scale are where we work best. The ones we struggle with are the ones still convinced that their hand-built system is a feature.

A mistake you see builders make repeatedly?

Treating every job like it’s new. Most residential builders are running 80% of the same product over and over, but the estimate process gets rebuilt from scratch every time. The time you get back when you templatise that, and the consistency you get on the other side, is enormous. Most builders are leaving it on the table.

What gets you fired up about this work?

Watching a take-off that used to take three days come back in minutes — and then the estimator using those two-and-a-bit days to actually look at margin and risk instead of grinding through schedules. That’s where the productivity in our industry has been hiding the whole time. Every job we automate is a senior person getting to think about something properly instead of doing data entry.

What values matter most in how we build TakeoffQS?

Move fast on clear signals. If something isn’t working, don’t sit on it. Plain language — estimating is technical enough, the way we talk about it shouldn’t be. And build with customers, not for them: if a builder hits a wall in our system, we sit next to them while we fix it. Those three are non-negotiable for me.

The human bits

Favourite mantra in a work context?

A business partner I’ve always looked up to has the saying: “keep it simple, stupid — KISS.” It applies across most of business. We’re all guilty of over-complicating things.

What can you nerd out on for hours?

Property development and construction. 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.