Lohman Contracting is a civil construction contractor in Queensland, Australia, whose services include mobile concrete batch plant operations. Their estimating logic had grown inside a complex, macro-heavy Excel workbook — years of hard-won pricing knowledge that the whole business depended on. We rebuilt that workflow as secure software, working alongside James Grundy, Lohman's Operations Manager, on weekly build calls.
The quotes below are James's own words, taken from recordings of those calls and lightly edited for clarity.
A workbook worth millions — and impossible to protect
James is not an Excel novice. As he put it:
"I'm pretty handy at Excel. I've definitely spent a lot of my formative professional years living in those little squares."
And Lohman didn't run on Excel by accident. The workbook was genuinely good:
"A lot of people laugh to hear that we're still working out of Excel — but it's reached a point where it has the flexibility and functionality that you can almost do what you want with it. For us, it's better than a lot of the off-the-shelf software options for estimating."
But the same thing that made it valuable made it dangerous to share:
"All of the information and workflows in that sheet are from years and years of learning lessons the hard way and iterating our productivity. It would be a multi-million-dollar exercise to do that again. We want to protect and preserve it as much as possible — and prevent anyone from lifting the sheet on the way out, because it's so easy to do with Excel."
The risks hiding in the workbook
The workbook had no guardrails. Every rate was typed by hand:
"You'd be amazed how many times it's happened — someone puts in an extra zero, or leaves a zero out, and that one line throws the whole job."
The same rate could live in dozens of places. For a business that runs its own mobile concrete batch plant, concrete pricing touches nearly everything:
"Concrete might be across 10 or 15 different line items, but it's all the same rate. You want to be changing it once — not 20 times across the sheet."
Parts of the inherited sheet were a mystery even to James:
"That's the one thing about this sheet that has always baffled me. There are so many markups across every tab — I've never used them, and I've never been able to figure out how to use them."
Other parts were dead weight — hard-coded workarounds and formulas he described as "a bit of a relic." The day-to-day mechanics wore the team down:
"You can appreciate how frustrating it can be to insert row after row after row and format. If you've got to do it a hundred times, it drives me insane."
And then there were the client bills of quantities. Some clients use standardized BOQs; others send whatever they like. James's reaction to one of those, on our first call:
"It gives me an aneurysm looking at it."
The dead ends before LlamaPress
James is a heavy AI user, not a skeptic:
"Oh mate, it's unbelievable how much we use Claude and ChatGPT — even as a construction contractor. I'm running 10 tabs of Claude in my browser, and I've got 50 projects going."
But even that didn't get the workbook converted. Spreadsheet-conversion services quoted "something astronomical — like 20 or 30 grand for the conversion." Doing it himself with AI hit a wall: "It struggled with that when I was trying to get Claude to build my Excel sheet." And he was ready to build the next tool on his own:
"I was going to go down the route of building it out through Microsoft Power Apps and SharePoint — but now I can appreciate how much you guys can do."
What tipped the decision was seeing that we'd already done it for a company like his:
"It was good to see the RSB contractor there — a similar industry and similar pain points. That's what has given me the most confidence."
What we built
We rebuilt the estimating workflow as web-based software Lohman owns: BOQ mapping, quantity-based productivity, regional rate sets, materials, equipment, project costs, pricing schedules, and tender versions — without exposing the proprietary rate logic to every user. Material prices live in a locked register and flow through every line item, so the extra-zero mistake can't happen. Estimators work in a familiar BOQ layout — down to matching the exact section colors James was "so attuned to" from the workbook — but the rate build-up stays protected.
James saw the difference on the weekly build calls:
"That functionality is phenomenal — you're constantly scrolling trying to find the right area to do your pricing. I love that already."
"This is the first screen we'd see coming in — already pre-populated, cost templates imported, labor productivity and costings. Excellent."
When we played his own process back to him, the design was right:
"That's it, Darren. Spot on."
What it changed for the business
Lohman now has a repeatable estimating process instead of a fragile workbook — one system that covers everything from civil works to mobile concrete batching. The pricing IP is protected, and bringing on new estimators is safe — their new senior estimator onboarded directly into the system, without ever needing access to the raw rate build-up.
"Just having that rigid system in place that people follow — that's been the biggest thorn in my side in trying to help run this business."
Speed changed too. Budget pricing went from an afternoon in the workbook to minutes:
"We can do it very quickly and easily — it populates with benchmark rates, we export it and say: here's our budget price. If we're in the ballpark, we'll refine it and quote it."
And instead of asking whether the software can keep up, James now asks the opposite:
"I'm curious how far we can actually take this. Can it read or receive emails and attachments, parse them, and populate a register? What's the limit on what it can do?"
By the end of the first call, the direction was already clear:
"Just listening to you guys talk in the last five minutes, I've already had quite a few light bulbs go off with different ideas and features. I'm really keen to explore it."
Weeks in, the collaboration hadn't slowed down. As James joked at the end of one session:
"I feel like your to-do list isn't getting any shorter, Darren. It just seems to be getting longer and longer."
