Monaro did not start with a product idea. It started with a question we could not answer: why does quoting a commercial mechanical project take so long when the drawings already contain the information you need?
So we went and asked.
September 2025: the profit centre managers
We started with two profit centre managers, because they feel the cost of a slow bid desk most directly. They talked about capacity rather than accuracy. Bids were being declined, not lost. If a drawing set landed and nobody had a free day to count it, the opportunity quietly went away.
That reframed the problem for us. We had assumed the pain was quoting badly. It was actually quoting rarely.
November 2025: the estimators
Then we sat with the coordinators and estimators who do the work. This is where the detail was.
They opened a PDF, navigated to the mechanical sheets, and read the engineer's equipment schedule. Then they counted. Diffusers, grilles, registers, fans and fixtures, floor by floor, tallying against callout tags. Four to eight hours on a mid-size commercial job, and longer on anything dense.
Two things stood out. The first is that the schedule almost never contains quantities: the engineer specifies what type of equipment goes where and leaves the counting to whoever is quoting. The second is that nobody enjoyed this part. Not one person described counting as the skilled part of their job.
The skill is knowing which supplier to call and what the drawing really means. The counting is just the tax you pay to get there.
January 2026: deciding to build it
By January we had heard the same story enough times to commit. The thing to automate was not the quote, and not the pricing judgement. It was the counting, and the retyping of schedules that comes with it.
That decision shaped everything since. It is why Monaro covers terminal equipment only, with no pipe, fittings or labour, and why the output is structured the way a distributor quotes rather than the way a contractor estimates.
What we would tell anyone building for this industry
- Ask about declined bids, not lost bids. The declined ones reveal the capacity ceiling.
- Watch someone do a takeoff before you design anything. It is slower and more manual than any description of it.
- Do not confuse the estimator's judgement with the estimator's busywork. Automate the second and leave the first alone.
