I have been on building sites since I was sixteen. I have been pricing them since 2012.
I am John Ellis, founder of 369 Construction Universe Group. I started as an apprentice plumber, trained as a quantity surveyor, and spent fourteen years inside main contractors and specialist contractors learning how money actually moves through a construction project. Then I built the systems to make it move properly.
Mace to specialist contractor, then my own clients.
Assistant QS at Mace in Leeds in 2012. Quantity surveyor at Morgan Sindall, then nearly five years at Esh Construction, then senior roles at a modular manufacturer and a regional contractor. In 2023 I set up 369 to project manage and act as commercial lead for private clients and small developers. Since 2025 I have also led pre-contract and commercial work for a national steel building systems business, where I introduced the quotation document now used across that business and run a team of estimators.
Across those roles I have delivered more than £250 million of construction work as the QS. I know what a pay-less notice looks like from both sides of the table, and I know what happens to a subcontractor who does not diarise one.
I hold a BSc in Quantity Surveying from Sheffield Hallam, SMSTS, and the plumbing qualifications I started with. I am not chartered, and I have never found a client who cared once they had seen the cost report.
Two things I kept seeing.
Good businesses losing money for process reasons
Trade businesses with excellent work and no commercial system. The owner carrying everything in their head. One bad contract away from trouble. The fix was never a bigger team; it was the discipline a main contractor takes for granted, installed in a business of eight people. AI has made that affordable for the first time.
Good people building everything except themselves
The same owners run on four hours' sleep, no training, and a plan they have never written down. I have spent as long working on that side of my own life as on the commercial side, and 369 Create is where I share what has held up: decide, believe, act on the next step, give more than you take.
Direct. Documented. Measured in money and time.
I will tell you when a decision is wrong before you make it. Everything we agree goes in writing. Every system we build is judged on whether it saved you money, won you work or gave you time back. If it did none of those, it goes.
I run 369 from North Yorkshire and work with clients across the UK. The business is small by design: me, an operator, and AI doing the admin, which is exactly the model I teach.
