Refined Group: the business we tested it on first
Refined Group is the Sydney building company our founder runs. Custom homes, pools and landscapes, live jobs, the usual mountain of admin. Everything below ran there before we offered it to anyone else.
Rebuilt from scratch, and owned outright
The old site was WordPress. Slow, plugin-dependent, and rented. The new one is fully coded, with no content management system underneath it.
Nothing to licence, nothing to renew, no plugin that breaks after an update, and no vendor who can change the terms later. The site is files the business owns outright.
Measured on the same browser under the same conditions, old site against new:
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Page load | 4.1s | 1.7s |
| Requests | 44 | 12 |
| Page weight | 1,689 KB | 813 KB |
One honest note, because you should hear it from us rather than find out later. The words on the page did not get better on their own. The content measured at parity with the old site. The case for the rebuild is speed, search and ownership.
What an agency would have charged
Published market ranges, not quotes we were given. Your own quotes will vary.
| Work | Agency | Mine |
|---|---|---|
| Custom-coded site, no CMS | $15,000 to $50,000 8 to 16 weeks | Built in-house Live July 2026 |
| SEO retainer | $1,500 to $3,500 a month 3 to 6 months to move | No retainer Moved in weeks |
Sydney sits at the higher end of both. A fully custom build with no WordPress and no page builder is the expensive end of agency work, which is exactly the sort of thing that used to be out of reach for a business this size.
Across the whole business
None of this happened in one go. Each piece got built when the pain got loud enough, which is how we would do it for you too.
-
The website and the search results
Rebuilt and live in July 2026. Twice as fast, and it now turns up on the first page for builder searches in the suburbs we work in. Impressions went 1,335 to 4,672 in five weeks.
-
Reporting that runs itself
A plain-English report on how the site and the search results are tracking lands in the inbox every Monday. Nobody has logged in to a dashboard since.
-
Agents that keep watch
Set once, running every day, watching for the things they were told to watch for and flagging anything that meets the criteria. They run whether anyone remembers them or not, which is the whole point.
-
WHS and compliance, rebuilt
The whole safety and compliance system rebuilt into documents that are current, consistent and usable on site, instead of a folder nobody opens until something goes wrong. Site registration now runs itself rather than being a form someone has to remember.
-
Tenders and estimating
A new tender template and new wording, built from the estimate rather than retyped every job. Same inclusions, exclusions and terms every time. On estimating it produces a first number to check, instead of building one from nothing.
-
The inbox
Thousands of emails sorted, filed and cleared against rules we set. The things that mattered stayed. The noise went.
-
A job history in one sitting
One job had months of email behind it and nobody could remember what had been agreed when. Twenty-two emails compiled in date order with the key points pulled out, exported as a single PDF. One sitting instead of a weekend.
-
A phishing attempt, caught
A landscaping enquiry came in that looked real. It was flagged as a credential-harvesting attempt before anyone clicked. That one alone paid for the setup.
Four things every builder should know
Connected beats clever. A chatbot that knows nothing about your business is a novelty. One that can read your email and your Xero is an employee.
Scheduled beats remembered. The reporting and the watching only work because nobody has to remember to run them. Anything you are meant to do weekly should be set and forgotten.
Owning it beats renting it. No content management system means no licence, no plugin that breaks on update, and no vendor who can change the terms later.
Guardrails are not optional. Nothing goes to a client without a human reading it. That rule is part of the setup, not an afterthought.
Want this in your business?
Same approach, your systems, your documents.