The Origin
Met at a stretch Hummer.
Started with billing.
Hamish met Julian at the same stretch Hummer night that gave Mike Greer's system its name. Hamish did Mike Greer's scaffolding — he was already in the orbit. A few months later he got in touch. He needed help with his billing.
Sky High Scaffolding was running on MYOB, and every single line of every single invoice was manually calculated — how many days had the scaffolding been up, divided by seven, multiplied by the weekly rental rate. Every line. Every invoice. Every month. His accounts lady was extraordinarily capable, but it was slow, and it was the kind of work that didn't need to be done by a human.
It didn't take many meetings to realise that billing, while real, was the secondary problem. The primary problem was Hamish.
The Real Problem
Everyone rang Hamish.
Hamish is one of those people who nobody expected to amount to anything — and all those people were completely wrong. He is an incredibly hard worker, has an eye for a deal, and knows how to make money. He had built Sky High Scaffolding into a serious operation through sheer force of will and intelligence.
But he was also the bottleneck for everything. Everyone rang him. He worked out who was doing what and when, entirely in his head. Every day he would prepare an email listing the next day's work — which truck was going where, what crew was on it, what they were picking up, where they were dropping it, what they were erecting and what they were stripping.
"I would sit across from him in meetings, and his phone would ring ten to twenty times. He scheduled an entire scaffolding operation from memory. It was extraordinary — and it was completely unsustainable."
The business had hit the ceiling that every founder-dependent business hits eventually. It could only grow as fast as Hamish could think, remember, and communicate. Which meant it couldn't really grow at all.
It took over two years of conversations, demonstrations and gentle persistence before Hamish finally cracked. He simply couldn't take it anymore. The volume had become too much even for him. That was the moment Squirrel was born.
The System
Squirrel — built for a scaffolding business.
The first version of Squirrel did one thing: create a job, raise a quote, and break that quote into aspects — the individual scaffolding elements that make up a job. Simple. Focused. Deliberately not trying to solve everything at once.
Then came scheduling. Aspects could be assigned to a truck. Staff could be assigned to a truck. The crew knew where they were going and what they were doing without ringing Hamish. His phone started ringing less.
Billing stayed in MYOB at first. The accounts lady kept doing what she did, manually and carefully. There was no rush to force change — the scheduling win was enough to prove the system worked and build Hamish's trust.
A couple of months later, once the quote data was in Squirrel and the scheduling was running, the maths became trivial for the system to do. Squirrel took over billing. After vigorous checking by Hamish — who trusted nothing he hadn't personally verified — it became the new normal.
This was also the middle of the Christchurch earthquake period. The scaffolding industry was running at full capacity — repairs, rebuilds, insurance work everywhere. Squirrel absorbed the volume without breaking a sweat.
The Moment
"I need fixed price quotes."
One day Julian arrived at the office and Hamish said he needed to be able to do fixed price quotes. This is the moment that captures everything about the Torro way of working.
What happened next
Julian asked exactly what Hamish meant. The answer was straightforward — some jobs needed to be quoted at a fixed price for a set number of weeks, rather than calculated on actual days.
The solution was two questions added to the Aspect workflow: Is this fixed price? If yes — how many weeks? If zero, calculate normally. If a number, use that number.
A quick database update. A few new lines of code. Julian left the office a few hours later with the feature working in the live system.
No specification document. No project plan. No six-week development cycle. A conversation and a solution.
That's not a special story. That's how every change works in Torro. The infrastructure is built to be malleable — adding something new doesn't require rebuilding anything old.
The Ending — And Why It Isn't One
Sold to the biggest. Still using Squirrel.
Eventually Sky High Scaffolding was acquired by the largest scaffolding company in New Zealand. A company that had spent millions of dollars building and implementing their own scaffolding management system.
Sky High still uses Squirrel.
That's not sentiment. That's a commercial decision made by a large, sophisticated business that had every reason and every resource to migrate away. They looked at what Squirrel did, looked at what their own system did, and kept Squirrel running.
"They had spent a lot of time and money building their own own system. Sky High still uses Squirrel. That is the only review that matters."
Thirteen years on from that first billing conversation, the numbers tell their own story.
jobs created and managed through Squirrel since day one
quotes produced — each one with automatic calculations Hamish once did by hand
invoices generated — every line calculated correctly, every time, without a human doing the maths