Work

I price construction work. Specifically, retail and commercial fit-out at the premium end — projects where the brand cares about a millimetre, the deadline cares about a day, and the client cares about both. Sydney based, mostly shopfitting, regularly Italian and European luxury, always under programmes that don't allow for guesswork.

What I do

• Tender pricing for retail and commercial fit-out — the kind of work where the difference between winning and losing is whether you spotted the assumption nobody asked you to question.
• Scope generation from architect drawings, increasingly with AI tooling I've built myself because the off-the-shelf stuff doesn't know what it's looking at.
• Subcontractor rate management and trade-by-trade build-up. The boring part most estimators skip — and the part most variations come from.
• Value engineering without quietly removing the things that made the design good.
• Multi-trade coordination on programmes that don't forgive miscommunication.

Where I work

• Premium beauty and personal care — Mecca, Aesop, and similar.
• Italian and European luxury fashion — MaxMara and similar. The brands whose tender docs are translated from Milan and assume conventions Australia doesn't share.
• Premium specialist retail — Kinokuniya, Libertine Parfumerie, and similar.
• Commercial fit-out — interior fit-out for retail and food and beverage tenants across Sydney and Melbourne.

Selected projects

• Aesop — Sydney Airport T1.
• MaxMara — Chadstone (Melbourne flagship).
• Kinokuniya — Chatswood Chase.
• Libertine Parfumerie — Chatswood Chase and Armadale (Melbourne).

How I think about the craft

Estimating is a discipline of named risk. Every number you submit is a defensible position on every assumption underneath it — drawings, finishes, sub-trade rates, programme, scope splits, the cost of every minor inclusion that the next site meeting will reveal wasn't actually minor. The estimators who win consistently aren't the cheapest. They're the ones who treat every hidden assumption as a future variation waiting to happen, and either price it in or kill it as a clarification before the tender goes out.

Same discipline runs through the tooling I build. Generic estimating software loses to estimator-built tools because the builder knows which assumptions are dangerous and which are decoration. The customer is the builder. See Domain expertise is the moat AI cannot replicate.

Currently building

AI-assisted scope-generation tooling for shopfitting estimators, used on my own tenders first. Bottom-up: identify the recurring three-hour grind in a real estimate, build a small targeted tool that compresses it to twenty minutes, validate by using it on the next tender. Then maybe sell it. More as the work matures and I have something worth showing.

Hire me, or talk to me

Best at vishvaddi@gmail.com. I'm open to:

• Senior estimator roles in fit-out, shopfitting, premium retail. Sydney.
• Estimating consulting on individual tenders — second-set-of-eyes work or full-quote builds.
• A long conversation with anyone building software for the AU construction industry. There's a lot to fix and not enough people who actually know what's broken.