The entry point
In 2019, the director of Hangan Steel — a structural steel fabrication business in Melbourne’s east — asked Jesse to come in and help “number-crunch”: quoting, win/loss ratios, and a few odd tech jobs. It was a favour between friends, not an engagement.
Walking the office, one thing stood out: the walls were lined with whiteboards. Active jobs, start dates, assignments — the entire job-tracking system, running on markers and erasers. The observation that started everything was simple: all of this could be a spreadsheet, entered once when a job is won.
The system they didn’t ask for
We built the job tracker they wanted. Then we layered on what they didn’t know to ask for: quoting calculators, quote tracking, client ranking, builder reporting, and a sales dashboard with win/loss ratios and pipeline. The twist: the digitised whiteboard data is barely looked at today. The secondary analytics — the dashboard nobody requested — became the thing the directors actually run the business on.
That system is now so capable it’s the reason they’ve never bought a commercial CRM: it does what they’d need, shaped exactly to how they work.
Growing with the business
Hangan Steel has grown roughly 30–40× since that first visit — from one factory to a dedicated head office and three fabrication sites across two states, roughly doubling every year. As they grew, effectively every technology decision started flowing through us:
- UniFi networking, cameras and security across every site — directors and managers can check any factory remotely
- Hardware procurement for offices and factories, and Starlink connectivity for on-site crews
- Printer contracts renegotiated so architectural drawings actually print properly
- Vetting third-party specialists — SEO, web, and others — so the directors don’t have to
The migration: 174 users, one tenant, 68% less
Google Workspace served them fine while small, but the group had outgrown it. We migrated 174 users across every Hangan business — each previously on its own systems, platforms and admin accounts — into a single Microsoft 365 tenant.
The saving came from architecture, not disruption. Instead of a flat per-user licence, every account was right-sized to its role. Like-for-like, on the 80 licensed accounts compared:
- Before: $1,888 a month — every account on the same flat plan
- After: $599 a month — licences matched to roles, with key staff actually gaining security features
- Saving: about $15,500 a year — a 68% cut, with barely any change to how staff work day-to-day
In the directors’ words: enough to put on extra staff. And through a provisioning setup where Microsoft manages identity into Google, the team kept access to their old Google files — without the Google bill.
The honest part
Migrations aren’t clean swaps, and we’d rather tell you that now. Small missing features outweigh big wins: shared folder colour-coding — something Google did and early SharePoint didn’t — caused more daily grief than ten Microsoft advantages could repair, until Microsoft shipped it. Moving people off Gmail’s no-frills threading was a genuine retraining curve. We trialled several file structures before landing the one that stuck. The result held because we managed the friction honestly, not because there wasn’t any.
The current phase: AI enablement
A large share of our time with the group is now AI training and automation. The standout: the factory manager — not a tech person, runs everything from a handwritten journal — now photographs each page into an AI workflow that reads the handwriting, matches entries to the right job and quote, and outputs clean structured data. Hours of manual entry, gone. The directors saw enough value that every office staff member now gets individual AI coaching, fortnightly, working through how each role can offload its busywork.
Why this story matters
One look at some quoting numbers became seven years as the technology backbone of an entire family group of companies — steel, construction, hospitality and accommodation. That’s our model in one sentence: start at one entry point, deliver value they didn’t ask for, and grow into wherever we’re most useful.