Our Story

Methvin’s story is really CEO Richard Gush’s story and it goes all the way back to a corner of South Africa. Richard was born and raised in South Africa. He attended school in Gauteng (Previously known as Jo’burg) and went on to college (Cape Technicon) to graduate in Civil Engineering in 1991. 

At the beginning of his career, Richard was lucky to work on a number of really exciting jobs all over South Africa that included the N1 Huguenot tunnel, Dams in Mpumalanga, redevelopment of the National highway through the Garden Route and a deployment to Malawi to build the highway between Lilongwe and Blantyre. 

It was during a secondment working away from home on the Garden Route in 1999 that the course of Richards life would be altered forever. One Friday on his 400km drive home, Richard and two of his team were involved in a serious car accident. During the 7 months that he spent recovering from this accident, to help with his recovery, his father encouraged him to redirect his attention and downtime and go on a Microsoft coding course. 

Not long after completing this course, in 2001 Richard with his wife Cheryl and their two small children immigrated to Auckland New Zealand to start a new life. 

Here in New Zealand Richard has worked for a number of the large construction companies as a Project Engineer and Project manager. In 2008 with a slump in the market he found himself working away from his family in Melbourne Australia for a year. The year away from his family reminded him of what is important, and on returning he applied for his first fixed desk job. 

While working in South Africa, lots of the responsibility for pricing had often sat with him as the Engineer, this however would be his first role as Estimator and he brought with him to the bid table his extensive project management knowledge.  It wasn’t long into his first role when he realised that for a lot of companies it was more “guess-timating” than Estimating and he started to bed down first principle pricing philosophies and formula’s to his own pricing schedules. Through his experience in using a number of estimating solutions Richard continually ran into issues around collecting, collating and sharing data. Not being that person to leave a problem unsolved Richard built his first rudimentary software program to resolve these issues in 2002. 

In 2015, with seed investments of just over $100,000.00 and a team of programmers recruited globally to work remotely, Methvin has grown to this incredible package that includes all facets of both Bid and Project management. While nothing short of miraculous when you consider what IT development can cost, it is testament to exceptional focus and planning with the use of great tools.

Since building this first iteration of Methvin himself, the program has seen more than 10 evolutions with the help of his global remote team. 

Richards I.T scrum team include programmers in Germany, India, Pakistan and Auckland, and his server support team is split between the United States and Australia. Richard really has put his money where his mouth is in terms of taking his whole business online, and, it has been safer and faster since he did this 3 years ago. 

In 2020 Methvin launched their newly developed website and full Agile application for construction, It was actually through the use of Agile and its facilitation of constructive team relationships that Richard saw it would be invaluable to construction teams who often have adversarial relationships with both subcontractors and clients. 

This shared space model and the contained cost it offers is the “why” Methvin exists. Richards determination to enable a more profitable route (enabled through better estimation) for the construction of infrastructure is what garners his determination to offer this product as cheaply as is possible. It is our hope that smaller subcontractors find better profitability through less guess work as well.

What is incredible is that all of this development has happened afterhours and on weekends and it speaks to a deep commitment to moving through the competitive complexity to offer something better to the industry. 

Methvin in the last year has gained visibility and the number of registered users has grown quite significantly to between 40 and 50 each week.

The number of calls to train up Estimators both locally here in Auckland and overseas via zoom or Skype accelerates monthly. Richards commitment to enabling these teams is demonstrated in making himself available to help teach where he can. 

In addition to these remote development teams Methvin has relied on the expertise of members of advisory teams to help establish several initiatives around proper IT scripting, Marketing and Customer Experience. The use of these advisory teams help us to contain development costs, and bring a unique insight from a broader market experience that might otherwise be less broad or insightful. 

We hope that you find our redeveloped web experience a good experience and that you find what you need here. We would love to hear from you so please feel free to drop us and email or book some time online with Richard.