Case Study
Charlie Arthur
Christchurch, New Zealand
How Premium Plastering & Painting uses Automate The Trades to manage quotes, scheduling, and invoicing - saving hours every week.
The Business
Premium Plastering & Painting has been serving Christchurch for 9 years with a team of 4 permanent staff plus 5–6 contractors. Their work is split roughly 70% renovations and 30% new builds.
Before ATT
Charlie ran quoting the way most tradies do - take notes on site, work them out afterwards. Each quote took around 20 minutes on site plus up to an hour after hours for bigger jobs.
Margin visibility was mostly gut-feel. As Charlie put it: “It was feel. If I didn't have good instincts I wouldn't have lasted as long as I have.”
The after-hours reality was familiar too: get home, wrangle the kids, dinner, bath, bed - then start on quotes.
The Problem
“There is no off button. If I take a day off I will get punished by having to work doubly hard the next day.”
Under-quoted jobs were a constant risk - including one where scaffold wasn't allowed for. “Normally I've chosen to sacrifice profit to keep a customer happy.”
“The guy who taught me to plaster changed my life. He put two and a half years into me, taught me how to work hard and love the craft - then told me to go travelling. He didn't care about getting his investment back. He just wanted to see me do well.”
“I wanted to be that guy for someone else. But I couldn't. I was 70k in debt, working 72-hour weeks away from my family. I had a toddler at home and a wife doing it alone. The business I built to give me freedom had become my trap.”
“And here's the thing - I wasn't lazy. I wasn't stupid. I just had no one to teach me the business side. There's no apprenticeship for running a company. No one shows you how to quote properly, how to understand your margins, how to stop the business living in your head 24/7.”
“That's why ATT matters to me. The trades are beautiful - you work with your hands, you work with your mates, bit of banter or the radio blaring, you get to be a maker, a craftsman. But too many good people are burning out because no one showed them another way. I've seen it. I've lived it.”
“This isn't just software. It's giving tradies their lives back.”
- Charlie Arthur, Owner, Premium Plastering & Painting
Using ATT
- Enquiries: text details → copy into ATT → “make me a calendar event” → booked.
- Plans change mid-day? Reassign someone in 30 seconds from a phone.
- Quoting: hit send before pulling out of the client's driveway - less than 5 minutes for big jobs.
- “It's not just time saved - it's accuracy. I've been guilty of lazy pricing.”
- Uses Mate for quoting, scheduling, job costs, and calendar management.
- Invoices get sent on the last day while leaving site.
- Biggest surprise: supplier invoices are read and auto-allocated to jobs.
Results
“Nothing worse than trying to make a well-calculated guess make sense after the fact.”
“It's the walk-in-the-door time. When I walk in the door after a day's work, my kids run up to me, my wife smiles at me - I'm actually home. I actually see them.”
“Before, I would say hello, look down at my toes and say, sorry guys, Dad's got to make a couple of calls... or I have to let the team know where they're going tomorrow.”
- Charlie Arthur
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