our storyBuilt from inside the trade. Backed to go further.
StairBiz started as one stair builder's answer to a problem nobody else had solved. Thirty years later, it's the business management system running stair manufacturers across six countries, and it's just getting started.
Where it startedIt started with the desire for more time to swim in the sea.
In the late 1980s, John Dibley was running a stair manufacturing business in Australia. Like every stair builder at the time, he was spending enormous amounts of time on things that weren't building stairs: like calculating string lengths by hand, drawing out landings and winders full size on the floor, pulling timber from the rack and guessing at lengths.
He bought a Hewlett Packard programmable calculator and started automating the calculations. Then the Macintosh arrived, and he taught himself to programme.
The motivation wasn't ambition, it was efficiency. If something could be automated, why do it manually? That question drove everything that followed.
The software he built, called Steps at the time, wasn't designed to be a commercial product. It was designed to run his own business faster (which meant more time to be able to swim). But the gap it filled was real, and it wasn't long before other stair builders wanted it too.
The evolutionFrom Steps to StairBiz.
From one business to 300.
When CNC machines started arriving on workshop floors, everything changed. The machines ran on PCs, and John had only ever used a Mac. He'd never booted a PC in his life.
Rather than walk away from CNC, he placed an ad in a programmer's forum: looking for someone to come to Italy, where he was living at the time, and teach him a new platform and a new programming language. A developer named Darren answered. Together, over months at a property on the Mediterranean, they rebuilt the software from the ground up. Steps became StairBiz.
Over the next decade, StairBiz grew into the most comprehensive stair business management system on the market, not a CAD programme deliberately. CAD does everything. StairBiz was built to do one thing: help stair manufacturers design, quote, produce, and manage jobs faster than any other tool. For the 90% of stairs that stair manufacturers build every day, nothing matched it for speed, accuracy, or ease.
By 2008, StairBiz had built a dominant position in the Australian market and was expanding into the UK and North America.
What came next was the most ambitious project in StairBiz's history.
the decade long buildWe bit off more than we could chew. We’re glad we did.
Version 10 was supposed to take one year and cost a hundred thousand dollars. It took ten years and several million.
The ambition was to rebuild StairBiz as a fully cloud-based platform with bells: concurrent licensing, browser-accessible, device-independent, with real-time sync across every user in a business. No other stair software was doing this. The technology, frankly, wasn't ready for what we were trying to do. We built it anyway.
The result is a platform that runs on any device with a browser. Licences that aren't tied to a computer or a person, and anyone on your team can log in from the office, the workshop, or a site visit, and they're looking at the same live data. A system that scales from a solo operator quoting five jobs a week to an enterprise running dozens of jobs simultaneously across multiple sites.
It was a struggle. We're very proud of where we arrived.
Today, StairBiz V10 is the most capable version of the software in its thirty-year history, and the most stable. The development period is over. The platform is built. What comes next is growth.
right now300+ stair businesses in six countries. All one system.
StairBiz is used by stair manufacturers across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Businesses ranging from solo operators running every job themselves to high-volume enterprises processing hundreds of stairs a week.
The software handles the full commercial lifecycle of a stair business, from the first measurement to the final invoice, without the double-handling, the spreadsheets, or the phone calls to find out where a job is.
New investment has brought the resources StairBiz needs to move at the pace the product deserves: development focused on closing the remaining product gaps, a marketing and sales function that didn't exist before, and a support model built for scale.
The product that spent a decade being built is now available to the market it was always meant for.