145. Data-Driven Performance With Matt Kelly

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You got to play a patient game at times you got to be very patient. Unfortunately, patience builders generally aren't patient, but you've got to play a patient game, especially with email marketings.

Welcome to Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely.

I'm your host, Will Blunt and today I'm joined by Matt Kelly from Crown Constructions.

Matt, welcome to the show.

G' day Will. Thanks for having me on mate. I'm looking forward to this.

I am really excited to have a chat to you. We met at the Professional Builders Summit I think last year very briefly in Sydney, which was very memorable for you in many ways I believe.

Yes, very memorable for me. Got caught up on stage in the, in the, at the VIP dinner so got made to look like a fool with some monkey mask and sing Elvis song. So quickly made a name for myself in the apb.

Yeah, it was funny. Funny because when I reached out to you about the podcast, I think I only put two and two together when I saw you in person. But it was a, it was a phenomenal event actually and you're a really good sport. I think it got everyone involved in that night which was cool.

Yep, glad everyone got a laugh out of it.

Anyway, enough about those in jokes. Talk to me about your background in the building industry. Crown Constructions. What do you guys do? What got you into the industry?

Yep, I guess yeah for, for myself I started out as a Carpenter, as a 16 year old carpenter and did me apprenticeship. Worked through the ranks under a builder that did like sort of custom homes, sort of higher end custom homes, sort of. Yeah, funky stuff. Grew up in a small town of 3, 000 people in the Alpine valley in Victoria, Town called Bright. So very boutique town. It's a very tourist town now so all the homes up there are very boutique. So yeah, work my way up through the ranks as a carpenter. You know I'm sort of to leading hand. Then went to subcontractor and sort of worked for multiple different builders and tested the waters in a few different fields and yeah then Sort of moved towns to where we're based now in Wangaratta and that's where I met Shane, me business partner. And then we ended up subcontracting to multiple builders together and then sort of from there what happened was we sort of got offered some smaller jobs like your standard bathroom renovations and your pergolas and your decks and all those type of carpentry sort of jobs. So we, we were sort of subbing around doing a lot of those things and then I guess sort of yeah, teamed up and both played a bit of footy. So both had similar, similar interests and working together and yeah, similar age. So the. Then we. Then from there we got offered a lady was building a job building a job building a house as an owner builder and she said do you guys want to just contract the carpentry work out and whatever else? So we sort of jumped at that and went yeah, no worries. So just sort of priced up the carpentry work and did the frame and the flooring and sort of just evolved from there. And then she sort of, I guess built a bit of trust with us and we spoke, did the fit out and then just did. Obviously did all the cladding. Pretty much did the whole almost project manager job for her from start to finish. Kind of just evolved as she sort of gained trust that were on that job. And then from there we pretty much just started our own carpentry business. Thought, oh why not, let's give this a go. Sort of was, yeah, getting a bit of a reputation, doing some good work and evolved into crown carpentry that then allowed us to, yeah, just do more bathrooms, more decks, more forgoers and sort of build up a bit of a reputation. Build up a bit of a. Yeah, sort of carpentry business side of things. Went and got a Limp Builders limited license in Victoria. It's domestic builders limited license. So we got that which allowed us to do some smaller extensions as well. But did that as we were doing that. I was doing my cert. Me and Shane were Both doing our Cert 4 in Building Construction at the time. So yeah, that sort of was the next two years after that just carpentry work, limited building work, subcontracting a bit still. Yeah. Then sort of decided after cert 4 it's probably natural progression to go get the unlimited license. So I went and got me unlimited license after people in the building insured now it's actually not that easy to get. It's a lot of study and a lot of. A lot of time. So it sort of was 12 months in doing the cert 4 there was another 12 months in study in doing that for the unlimited license and then book in, get your, do your exam, pass the exam, then you book in for an interview in Victoria it's the vba so Victorian Building Authority so had to go and do an interview with that. So yeah that all went through, progressed, got passed and then effectively as we are now which is crown building and construction or we crown construction for short. So that evolved from there and, and that's what we are today and that is eight, just gone eight years now.

Wow.

So it's been a bit of a journey for, for crown building and construction and obviously crown carpenter was two years before that. So me and Shane have been teamed up for probably just going on 10 years now. So yeah, my story I guess is the start. 16 year old as a carpenter, just literally just work the way up, up the ladder, through the ranks, doing the hard yards on site into more those supervisory type roles, leading hand roles, a lot of hands on work, understanding how things get built, how things go together and then that's. Yeah me and Shane just met, played a lot of footy together and then just thought why not, let's have a go at this. And his, his story is nearly identical to mine as well. He, he was a carpenter as well, don't want to speak for him but his, his story is very similar to mine as well. He was a carpenter, worked his way up. He, we both played footy. He, we met and sort of just consistently yeah punching out carpentry work and here we are today building custom homes and something going to touch on very shortly is a home that we've got some recognition for but I guess that's our, that's my background story and yeah now we're building, designing and building custom homes and looking to grow and evolve and hence where we are today now within the APB and getting some guidance and some mentoring.

Yeah, I'll come back to the custom home stuff in a moment but when you talk about footy you're talking about afl I'm assuming being a Victorian.

Yes, sorry, I forgot we're national and even global.

We've got to really clarify.

Yeah, so that's Aussie rules. Footy. Yeah. Which is the afl. Aussie rules. Yeah, that's, that's for us in Victoria, that's our main sport. But yeah, that's exactly right.

Do you still play at all or.

Still trying to play at the moment. I've been a bit injured, getting a bit longer in the tooth these days but just had a few games back recently from an injury so cross fingers. I'm still alright. No more injuries to come.

Takes a toll on the body I imagine.

Takes a big toll on the body getting smacked around every week but yeah, then rock up on a Monday and you strap the nail bag on and go again. Obviously these days I don't have to do that. Sit in an office and under the, under the heating, heating and cooling which is nice.

The ankle or whatever you've injured that weekend.

Desk with another chair just to keep the legs, keep the legs up. But yeah, it definitely has taken its toll on the body over the years but.

Well, I guess that's why it's so good that you could transition into more of an office role. Talk to me about that transition. You've been on a really sequential journey. Just kind of sounds like you've just chipped away at each stage. Right. But I imagine there's such a big difference from building a home, working as a subcontractor compared to running a building company. What have you found is the biggest challenges around that transition?

Definitely, obviously just being a carpenter and knowing nothing about I guess business and paperwork and quoting and this sort of learning and trials and tribulations and making mistakes and I guess that those early days are the hardest parts. Transitioning from just being a carpenter to how to quote. Like I guess there's no real. There's no specific courses on exactly how to quote because every building company is different and they quote differently and there's different things and so it's just sort of, you know I remember those days of just pen and paper tucked away in Shane's front lounge room. At one stage we were, you know, late at night. Yeah that transition from yeah just been on the tools to like actually trying to run a business knowing what your numbers are and where your business is going and knowing if you're going. Not knowing if you're going broke or not going broke but you sort of just as most guys would know, you sort of fly by the seat of your pants and till you grow enough you. And then you realize like well there's a lot of money coming in and out of our bank account. Like knowing that if there's. When the bills coming, if there's actually enough there. So I guess that transition from tool from off the tools to you know, spending more and more time in the office which is probably at a stage where I was ready for that. It'd been a long slug on the tools where we live here in Northeast Victoria, the temperature changes so much from winter to summer, so it's freezing cold and frosty in the winter and in summer it's 40 degrees. So getting that rest right in the, in the office wasn't such a bad thing.

But consistently 20, 25 or whatever you wanted that.

Yeah, 23 degrees every day. Now I know what people who live in Queensland feel like when I'm sitting in the office. It's nice bloody controlled temperature but no getting, getting. Yeah, definitely transitioning from just trading to business owner and then sort of employing your first staff members or a bit nerve wracking and like how does this go now? I've got to pay someone else to do the work. We got enough work coming in. Yeah. Just transitioning from tradie to business owner is obviously a very. It's like starting a whole new job, a whole new career again learning these things. And hence we grew our business very quickly in the early days and kind of almost shit ourselves and went, whoa, what's going on here? This is crazy. And then we sort of sort out some mentors to help us learn that business side of, side of things and yeah, I guess, yeah, that's the transition of trading to business owners. Definitely, definitely a challenging part of it.

Yeah, it can get pretty scary I think when you start hiring people and making sure you get enough money coming in, especially if you're not fully across your numbers and how much cash you got in the business.

Right, yeah, 100%. Especially when you grow quickly and which is sort of what we did early days just. Yeah, making sure there was enough cash there because you can see a lot of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars coming in and like how good is this? And then next, the end of the month there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills, you know. Oh, the emotional roll control and the emotional roller coaster was yeah, definitely early days is hard but nowadays it's, it's all right because we've, we've learned a lot and we know a lot of this stuff now.

And cash flow, what's been the best tactic for you to control that emotional shift?

Cash flow forecast, definitely. Cash flow forecast. So knowing where you're going, your pipeline of work, what cash you got coming in, roughly what your bills are going to be going out, that definitely just puts a mind at ease. Three months, six months in advance. Exactly. Effectively what your bank account number is going to be. Cash flow forecast was probably the biggest thing as we transitioned. Definitely. And then obviously now it's probably more cash flow and WIPA together.

Wipa work in progress, Accounting Adjustment. Just a bit of a plug for that one there. But before we dive into some of those details, I'm keen to hear about the building award you recently won. So I guess a lot of the hard work you guys have put in over years has been paying off because you've been recognized for one of the projects, one of the homes you built. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

Yep. So when's that last? Probably a couple weeks ago now. We went to so through the Master Builders association, through the Northern Victorian Master Builders Award. So we won best custom home, 800,000 to a million bracket. So yeah, a lot, a lot of years of which, yeah, which was good recognition I guess for the work we've been grinding and grinding, grinding away at for sort of eight years since we've been able to build homes under our unlimited license. So yeah, just building our way out, gaining the trust for our clients and they're just getting approached to do bigger and bigger projects as we. As we've got more recognition and reputation and trust in the industry. So yeah, winning that award was, yeah, bit of a pat on the back all the hard yards and the years and years of grinding and to be able to, you know, complete those projects at a high level and have our team trained to be able to carry out those projects as well. Because it's not me or Shane, we're not the ones on site banging in the nails and actually physically doing the work. We've, you know, got a great team that we've been able to put our trust in and train them to do it how we expect to be done. So yeah, it was good recognition on the night. Yeah, definitely great project clients. Great clients as well. So to have that recognition was yeah, definitely rewarding and hopefully, yeah, many more.

To come out of interest, how did you find that client?

That great client, that great client was found through a. He's actually another local business owner himself or themselves. But so yeah, we, we'd done. He was actually car dealership owner so we'd bought a couple of new Ford Rangers off him and. Right. He'd obviously seen our stuff online on socials and whatnot and yeah, he just sort of approached us and away it went from there. He's a good likes. He's a guy that likes loyalty within the community.

Yeah.

So we're other local business owners that supported him so he was more than happy to. Happy to support us as well. But yeah, obviously he's. The project he was looking to build was obviously suited A certain builder and we obviously fitted that mold with what was looking to get done. So yeah, beautiful waterfront property. Two story. Yeah, beautiful sort of architectural waterfront property. Yeah, well designed. So yeah, that client was. Yeah, we think they, we think we nailed it for them so.

Well, yeah, I had a look at the photos and there's certainly something you can hang your hat on there. Interested to hear more about how do you use the, I guess the credibility of that award in your marketing? Because the reason I found out about it, I was on your marketing list and got an email announcing it which I thought was a great way to just keep people, you know, nurturing your community, all that kind of stuff. Is there other ways you've used it to build that credibility?

Yeah, definitely. We've with that was a little tip from our business coach Jacob actually about, and we about pushing it out to our whole database. He's like, you shouldn't even push this out to your whole database. I'm like, ah, you hadn't thought of that yet and hence you're on the list. So yeah, we've got, we've got an in house marketing coordinator. She does an amazing job. So we've just setting up a lot of more marketing things around when special things happen like whether it's an award or a big contract signing or an internal staff thing. So we push that out to our database, celebrating that and design it up in a nice design format. We've got thousands of people in our database and it's silly not to push that out to them. We've also used that in, we've created obviously across our socials. So across Instagram and Facebook we've created some posts around photos from the night of us having the award with photos of the project that won really made a bit of a song and dance about it. We created reels from the night and our marketing coordinator, she's created reels from the night, took footage from the night and created reels, pushed them out onto our socials as well as well as your general posts across both social platforms and then obviously push it out to our database as well. So kind of push it out over a couple of weeks with about six different posts and different types of content posts. So reels and posts and you know, E Blast. So yeah, used it as much as we could. It's obviously going down to our website now and yeah, just pushing that as much as we can and into as many places as we can. And yeah, it's, it's, it's got, we can see in the back End of our sort of engagement across our socials and the opens on our E Blast. It's actually. Yeah, it's probably our best performing.

Oh really? That's cool.

In a long, long, like a long, long time. Obviously people love to see that and get a bit of recognition and win an award, but yeah, it's got, it's. It's actually gone crazy locally. We get a lot of comments locally out in the community and I see you won that award and that's great. Congratulations.

And yeah, and that's perfect, right? Because people talk within a community and all of a sudden, you know when, when someone is looking to build a home and fits your perfect criteria like you mentioned before, like the car dealer, then you guys will be top of mind.

Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it's definitely. Especially in a smaller, small. We're in a regional town, so especially when we get something out like that. Yeah, definitely gets around pretty quick. And definitely good recognition for sure.

Yeah, awesome. I mean, just. Just to talk a bit more about your email marketing, I've been on your list for a little while. I can't remember why I joined originally, but was checking out what you were doing and you do a great job of just kind of ticking it along. I don't actually live in regional Victoria, so not, not an ideal client for you. But just ticking along the educational, like valuable content ever since I joined. And a lot of that's aut, right?

Yeah, definitely. And a lot of this is from the APB that we have, you know, grasped and adopted that email marketing system and now we've got someone internally doing our marketing. We're actually just really starting to customize that further to ourselves and what we do and a little bit more regional wording in it and we're just getting real specific with that now. Yeah. So also when they either download our lead magnet, they go into our flows and we've got a couple of different flows at the start and they eventually go into the one, but then we have. Yeah, yeah, that's our email marketing system. So just constantly evolving and adapting and adjusting that to suit us specifically.

That's a great point though. I mean you can take something out of the box, but you really need to personalize it to your specific location, target audience, all that stuff.

Definitely. And obviously APB provide you the templates and the tools. But yeah, if you put the time into it and customize it to yourself and read it and. Okay, that doesn't quite make sense for what we do. Let's just adjust that a little bit and you can get real specific with it then obviously hopefully you can talk to your exact market or your exact ideal client. If not them, they've probably got a friend or a family member that's going to be talking that they could talk to. And I got this email from this builder and now it talks about this here, have a look. So you can get real. You got to get specific I think especially this day and age with what homes you're looking to build and what market you're looking to. Looking to hit on top of our email marketing stuff also like our blog posts get e blasted once a month with just specifically about the new blog that we've released and then we have a monthly wrap that also goes out which is generally either a few different things in it, it's like a newsletter but we call them a monthly wrap which a few different things in it and then it'll be a bit of a wrap for me as well in terms of a video talking about a few, talking about what's happened for the month and project updates and things like that. So yeah, really utilizing that database because once you build it to a few thousand people, it's a lot of people you can go directly to their inbox.

Yeah, exactly. And you don't know when they're going to be ready to build. They may have come in at any point in the journey. Right. So just kind of staying top of mind and making sure that you're relevant.

Absolutely. We've had speaking if you don't know when they're gonna build it. We've had which we see now in our. We use HubSpot as our CRM and marketing system. We see people opening emails and downloading our stuff from 912 months ago and then all of a sudden they pop up, search their name. They've been in our system for 12 months just getting drip fed all their information. Then all of a sudden they're ready to go. They got their land sorted or they got their finance sorted or they got they've sold their home, they got the situation sorted and that's. That just reinforces it for me that it's a long burn sometimes and that that consistency of email marketing, consistency of content, it does pay off. You got to play a patient game at times but you got to be very patient. Unfortunately, patience builders generally aren't patient but you've got to play a patient game. Especially with email marketing. It's definitely we can just continue to educate, bit of inspire. Educate and inspire. I think over consistent time, 6, 912 months, you can get that a grade client that just pops up at 12 months time. But if you're not there, if you're not there and you're not consistent, when they're ready they're probably gonna go call someone else that either is being consistent and they have been saying their stuff or they just think they just open up their socials and see whoever pops up first and they'll do. But yeah, if you can stay consistent and front of mind there's no reason why they shouldn't get in contact with you. And, and yeah, I've seen that happen over the last couple of years and it's when you first start it, it's hard to see and you're like this is going to be when am I going to get results? The sooner you start, the quicker you're going to get results at the end of the day.

Well the way I look at it, right, like if you're, if you put yourself in the, the home builder's perspective, they have no idea who you are initially and they're potentially building an 800 to a million dollar, 800,000 to a million dollar home. It's a big investment for them so they need to really be confident and trust the stuff that you're doing. So that can take a long time.

Definitely. I was talking about this with our marketing girl Anna the other day. We're talking about the, how many touch points people need in this day and age. Obviously the attention span's gone right down for people. You know, back five or six years ago it was like six touch points or something. Now it's up over 20 points to build that trust. Trust, trust. No like Factor up over 20. We're doing some research the other day. I can't remember the exact number but it was well over 20. I'm like that's a lot of different touch points for.

I feel like that number increases almost every year, doesn't it?

Yeah, definitely. And that's about staying relevant with your content and your marketing and consistent consistency is obviously the key in everything but just being consistent it does, does take time but I feel it's probably the biggest thing these days about staying relevant and staying in front of people's faces and on their screens.

Yeah, you mentioned HubSpot there. I'm interested to hear like what software has had a big impact on your building company. Would you say HubSpot or is there another one?

We use. We use three different softwares as probably sounds a lot but it's kind of not so we obviously have. So we have BuildXact, which is our project management estimating software. So when we originally sort of, that was our first software we ever got. So that was, that made a massive difference in terms of scheduling and project management and estimating which. Yeah, we find that's pretty good. HubSpot, we use that. We've only had a HubSpot now for probably 18 months maybe. Obviously a really good CRM system. Does a lot, a lot of things, a lot of automation. We use that for obviously our email marketing and marketing stuff out of there. We can do a whole lot of things with social media and you connections with your social channels in there, but we just don't find that 100 good. We still use the social platforms themselves for scheduling and whatnot. But in terms of like note taking and tracking and reports that can create like we've set up all our reports in there that just automatically updated and like. Yeah, just took a, took a while to set up but Jesus, it's made a massive difference just in terms of automation. And I don't have to do a lot of manual tasks. It's all just there month after month after month. The reports just months, yeah, update, update, update. And I just put them into our APB KPI workbook and away we go. It doesn't, you can't stuff it up. Cause it's literally what the data says. There's no manual data, there's no spreadsheet tracking. It's. Yeah, that's probably. That software has probably made another big difference in our business as well. Another one we use is Trello, which is going to be used for multiple things just like task lists and stuff like that. We use that for a lot of our workflows in terms of task lists, especially when projects are in design and then construction. So at the front end of planning and design the sales guys will use it because we've got checklists all through there, what needs to happen when what stages the project's at. And then construction guys use it as well actually for all their QA checklists. So checking off everything from, you know, your site set outs in your slab and your frame and yeah, developed all checklists at different stages, so created heaps of different cards and developed all their checklists in there and you know, I think which is, yeah, there's a lot of checklists now but they're all to make sure there's minimal errors and yeah, minimal lost time. And so yeah, we use, we use those three softwares. It probably sounds a lot, but we find they've all got their Specific areas for it, a lot of them now everything's on your phone with all those softwares, all the Trello build Exact even can be on the phone now a bit. HubSpot's on the phone as well. So very, very easy and very compatible for devices. And they need an Internet connection and you got access to everything.

Yeah, Trello is an awesome tool. I've haven't been using it at apb, but we. I used it a lot in my previous when I ran my own company and it's amazing for just setting up those like having the sequential processes set up. Right. And then templatizing it all as well. Do you guys have like a. Like a template you'd use for a project or something and then just duplicate that out or how's it work?

Yeah, definitely. So we just got up like set up different columns which is like where they're at in the States. They're in concept design.

Yeah.

Preliminary building or contracted. So we've got some columns set up that we just have a template card that we've just developed and kept setting up. So in that card then we set up the concept workflow. So what happens in the concept stage for revisions and ordering soar reports and surveys and things like that. And when I go to pba, same thing. They've paid their invoice. It's been the account scales, received it in the account. So we can press on, order more preliminary stage and press on more, more next stage of the design. Yeah, when selections are ready to be booked. So it's all in just a big long checklist workflow then just. Yeah, big templates and then we just go through there also. And if things aren't like. If it doesn't need a planning permit, we'll just put NA next to that and just. Yeah, just a big template and then we just duplicate that. When someone signs on.

Does that integrate at all with like HubSpot or build exact or are you separating them all out?

Trello actually does integrate integrates with a lot of things. Like we use Google Drive as our drive storage, as our document storage. And so it can integrate with that into. Can integrate with HubSpot as well. But we find like we don't get any extra value with the integration because everything's so accessible on your tabs, on your screen. Just flick between the other. Yeah, we just found it didn't actually give us any extra value. So it's like yeah, the integration's there, it's great, but it doesn't really add any value.

We found how much of an impact have you found like having those like repetitive checklists in place which you can improve and everything over time and then continue to use on like variability of quality and everything like that?

Yep, definitely. So especially early on when we were not starting out, so probably a couple of years into our, I guess full building journey, we started to look at tools and softwares to make things easier and, and we just develop checklists and processes on, you know, the homes that we're building at that stage. And they're more your standard sort of single story homes quite, you know, easy construction standard hit roof stuff. And as we sort of evolve with the project types like you got a bit more customized, a bit more fancier, a few different roof lines. We've kind of just, you know, learned and evolved as we go and every time there's a, either a mistake or we feel something's been missed, we've got to go seek information. First thing is, goes into the template. Goes into the template. We just keep.

Yeah, that's awesome.

More and more and more because yeah, listen, you know, last thing we want to do is number one lose time or number one lose money, number two lose time. So if we can get on the front foot, always on the front foot. Looking to evolve to be, you know, front and center. So when the next big, big project comes through, we're just minimizing small mistakes every time to be more efficient. Hopefully get build times go quicker. Keeps the frustrations around the whole business a bit lower. Like frustration from the supervisor frustrations I guess from me and Shane as a business owners, like why is this shit happening? So yeah, obviously makes it a lot easier for the supervisor to run more projects because everything's more organized. So getting a bit more out of them as well.

Would you say that you've got less complaints from customers as well?

Definitely a lot, A lot less. Definitely a lot less compliant.

At least you know where to go to answer the. In the, you know, question if, if he comes in.

Yes, correct. A lot less complaints just because things move a lot smoother. We've got a lot of communication processes in place as well. Excuse me. Which we find is communication is probably the biggest thing. Yeah. In terms of. So they, you know, feel in the. Feel in the know what's going on.

Are you doing that through build exact or.

No, we actually just do that through. Well obviously the supervisor just does his phone and text and email stuff. The admin actually sends out a weekly update to the client with what's going on for that week. We tried that communication stuff through BuildXact but we just couldn't find it exactly working.

Perfect.

Yeah, we wanted it to work.

You could potentially automate it through HubSpot as well. But I guess it gets pretty challenging if there's. There's a lot of personalization per job, right?

Yes, definitely. Yeah. We'll be trying to do a bit of work with HubSpot with automation stuff at the moment, but we just found the same thing just gets a bit templated.

Yeah.

And it's like one would be rather be more personal with the. With the client. Yeah, we're just working out some strategies around that.

Yeah.

Cool.

I guess some of those update emails probably you could automate to a certain extent and then do some add some personal touch as well.

Yep.

Awesome, man. Well, like I love the way you've basically systemized your whole business and you've got the checklist. They're constantly improving. It sounds like a phenomenal way to run jobs and maintain consistency. One question I like to ask is how has APB helped your building company since you joined? What's that journey been like for you?

Yep. So we've been with the APB now for 18 months. I think when we, we first joined up and did our first strategy session, we went straight into business coaching. We'd had previous business coaches before, so I knew straight away that we wanted to go into the business coaching, which is what we call mentor mentoring.

Business coaching we call it now. So that's good.

Change its name. So yeah, where is he in that level with business coaching? So obviously having a coach for accountability is definitely number one because as a business owner you can sort of get, you can actually just get bogged in the day to day and fight fires and with whatever's going on without being sort of structured to what you need to get done to, you know, develop the business further, whether that's processes or checklists or you know, new data tracking or whatever that may be, or setting up your company manual for instance. So you have, number one's been having a coach and a mentor to go through your numbers and really oversee what's going on and you know, sort of get held accountable to how the business is going and then sort of, I guess direct you to what you need to focus on and work on. And if you've got some issues that can, they'll help you to help you to iron out those issues and, or focus you on something else that you need to get set up but allow you to. Okay, let's just hold this for a minute. And work on this other. Other thing that needs to be worked on. The APB action plans and, and the, the portal you get access to. The content in that is nothing I've ever seen before because it's builder specific. Like, like I said before, I've just. We've had mentors previously but having this type of specific content for builders really opened my eyes when I did the first few action plans and I thought wow, this is, this is going to help immensely and certainly fast track development of the business and development of sort of where we wanted to go as a business and develop our processes. Yeah, that, that, that portal is, is something that yeah obviously I've never seen or come across before, but it's almost like having a business coach in your pocket that you can do anytime, anywhere.

I like that. I might steal that tagline.

Go for it. That's, that's what it's like. It's. There's. Yeah and there's so many different topics in there. Like anything from you know, onboarding and HR and recruitment and to like, you know, your pricing for profit and your WIPA and cash flow and then you've got your full sales and marketing plans and like even how to create, you know, lead magnets and setting up your whole marketing system. There's so much content in there. Like to go through all that but then to implement all that would be is you know, some of the guys who are, you know, like your Stannards and Norm Wales who are at the top of the levels like yeah, four, five, six years to, to do and implement like there's a lot and a lot, a lot of content in there to, to actually. Yeah. Digest but not that to action and implement that portal is just. Yeah, that is a bit. It was a big eye opener for me when we joined but then the value out of that is insane. Like I think, you know, just for on membership level to get that per year is. Is it's probably too cheap to be honest for what you pay for the. Pay for a year membership.

How did you approach that? Because I think that's probably a common challenge is there's so much to do. Right. And especially depending on where you're at in your journey, if you haven't implemented a lot of stuff yet or you've only got some stuff done like how do you know where to start? What did you guys do?

Well, I guess for us cause we went straight into business coaching. We got directed. You know, this is where you're. Where our business at. This is where your business at Right. Do this marketing plan as you know, sales blueprint for builders and your introduction to marketing. Those two tie in together straight away. Do those two create your avatar? So sort of starting at the top. Yeah, with a business coach, I guess they tell us, told you where to start and what you need to work on and what you need to do. I guess for your just membership level guys. I've met a couple of membership level guys. Yeah, I guess I'd start at your sales. That's where you want to start. Like you're a tradie business. You just want to start at sales, you got to get new work. And that's just an eye opener in itself, that one. But I guess it doesn't matter where you start with that portal. All of it is relevant and you'll know exactly where you need to start. Like if you've got staff, you'd probably want to start at your culture and onboarding stuff and then. Yeah, it doesn't really matter where you start. They are all valuable no matter what.

I guess to your point, if you. What's the point of having good culture if you got no jobs either? So yeah, sales are important.

Yeah, sales is obviously very important. And then creating your target market and not creating your target market, identifying what your target market is and creating your marketing around that.

You mentioned Jacob, who's your coach and you mentioned the opportunity of just talking through issues and things like that. Can you think of an issue that you came across over the last 12 months where you've just spoke to Jacob about that and worked through it together.

Obviously? Yeah, a little bit. And probably through our marketing and sales and our pipeline stuff for us it's been a bit of a challenging post Covid. Challenging times just with economic factors as everyone knows, material price rises, interest rates, all the economic doom and gloom in the world at the moment, us being regional. So you know, smaller, smaller pool of people call it and we're I guess probably one of the bigger builders, probably one of the biggest builders in our, in our town and region call it just in terms of like, you know, staff and whatnot. So we need a lot of projects to, you know, keep the wheels turning and the doors open and to make good profit. We need, you know, we need a good amount of projects. So always identifying those high level numbers of like where's your leads at, where's, where's, you know, how your conversions going, all that type of stuff. So in the last 12 months, probably that's been our biggest challenge. It's probably always going to be A challenge for builders. But yeah, it's probably been our biggest challenge and we've gone hard on our marketing in the last six months because employing someone internal just fully set up like it's a risk employing an internal marketing person full time just to do marketing. But I think we are starting to see, I guess now that the data and our numbers are really starting to climb. Hence we're talking earlier about our being patient to seeing the rewards come through. But yeah, just leaning on him through where our numbers are at. What are we doing about it Looks okay. What are you trying to do now? What are you trying to set up? How are you trying to help yourself? What's, you know, your website? Do an audit on our website, which we just done a month ago. I think we'd set up a whole brand new website. It's like redo an audit on it, like. So we did that. We peeled out a heap of things that were sort of wicked better and few things that were missing like Ryan, there's another thing we're missing is this aligned to the APB strategies of doing a website auditing, our social media auditing, like we talked about earlier about email marketing. So auditing that is that specific enough? Are we pushing out, are we using our database enough? So it's been really good, you know, he's been really good from that point of view where they were, you know, my biggest challenges, it's like, what are you doing about, you know, are you looking at it deep enough where you're pushing things out to, you know, are you tracking things close enough? So just makes you really open your eyes and really forces your hand to actually, actually go and do the work and find out if you can be doing more or if you can be doing things better, if you could be putting things in more places to, you know, obviously try and boost those leads up, looking at your ads. So we'll see with our marketing person internally now, she's, you know, all over the ad. So auditing what our ads were, what creatives we've got, how are the creators performing? Testing them. So I want a lot, a lot of work around that, especially this tough market. If we can be in front of as many people as we can, we're gonna have a better chance of hitting our, hitting our numbers and getting those.

Good quality clients that you want to work with.100.

So it's still challenging. It's still definitely still challenging. But it's having, you know, that coach to really force your hand and really, you know, make sure you're Going to do the work and coming back with the work done effectively because if the work's not done, you're gonna get a slap on the wrist.

It sounds like you're in a good place though. It's like you've got your systems in place and you're tracking a lot of the key data points and now you're in a process of consistent improvement and stuff like that. So like, yeah, I mean, it's a great place to be in by the sounds of it.

Yeah, it feels like we're only just scratching the surface too still. Yeah, we've still got a lot of things to set up. We've just started working on our sales manual, getting that all set up. Been working on that with one of our admin admin girls. So yeah, the next thing for us is really documenting our processes and getting that dialed in and that's going to be a big task in itself. But yeah, for sure feel like we've got our sales process set up quite well. Our marketing system's starting to really work well and now it's here, the sales manual and the processes and, and that'll really dialed in, which is obviously going to be another couple of year process. But yeah, just doing the work, like actually doing the work. And yeah, it's not easy and if anyone thinks it is going to be easy, it's not. It's. It's hard. Yaku. And another thing that I'll keep banging on about is consistency, just being consistent, just chipping away, chipping away, chipping away and getting the work done and then hopefully we can yield the results in the next, within the next couple of years and be sitting up there near level 9 and 10 with the, with.

The big boys, the professional builder levels. You know, I appreciate you sharing all that because you are just chipping it away and it's not easy work. But I love, I love how consistent your mentality is around that.

Yeah, no, definitely.

What, what impact have you? I mean there's, there's a lot of stuff that you're doing from sales process to marketing to hiring and all this kind of stuff. What impact have you seen on your margins since working with APB over the last 18 months?

Yep, definitely. We, our markup has gone up by 7% so we are now pushing that industry standard of 33.33. We're actually even slightly above that now, leaving ourselves little buffers. So yeah, previously we were down at 27. Think we're marking up 27. Don't ask me why. I don't Know why that's just a.

Number we, to be fair, I mean it, it's actually pretty good as a starting point compared to some.

So yes, I remember back, way back when we me first ch first started we're just marking up 20% on carpentry jobs and thought we were going, thought we were bloody unbelievable carpenters and the best things going around but little did we know. So yeah now, now we're, we've definitely pushed. We flushed out all our previous jobs over the last 18 months that were on those lower margins. All ours are now getting up to that industry standard, which is pleasing. When we first joined the apb it was a bit scary thinking, far out, that's another X amount per job. How are we going to do that? But once you get over that fear and be consistent, you might not win the first one. That's at that margin. It's like, oh that's not going to work. But you just got to keep being consistent and it does come down to your sales process and your marketing and providing value in your sales process without clients that just don't even blink at the end of the day. That's the industry standard and I believe, knowing what I know now, I believe that that's the minimum, that's where it should be because this, you know, it is such a high risk industry where something goes wrong you can, a lot of money can go down the table pretty quick. So now we've definitely pushed our margins up. I think. Yeah, it's about 7 or 8% in terms of markup which is obviously now that's getting us. That is pretty much. We are hitting our 25hp pretty much every job now consistently. So we are at those, those GP and markup margins consistently hitting the APB and all our industry standards. Yeah, our net profit still needs a bit of work just simply because our workload, we've sort of got everything really set up now we just need to get that top end inquiry and pipeline full and then the profit will take care of itself.

It's always a moving base. Right. Like if you're trying to grow, obviously it's going to take a bit of a hit but over time, yep, definitely no.

So yeah, the obviously work. Yeah. Working with the APB has been unbelievable to this date and yeah, we're looking to continue, continue our partnership and continue.

I appreciate you sharing all that man. Like I don't, I feel a bit awkward spending too much on it but it's awesome to see like a lot of the systems you've put in place and the impact it's had on your business. And you guys are doing some really cool builds as well. Based on what I saw in the, the award. What's, what's the future for crown constructions or crown building and construction? Sorry.

Yep. Yeah, for us it's just the next couple of years will be getting out, getting our company manual fully done up, getting that all sorted. So it's very, you know, all the processes and are all systemized, getting the whole business fully systemized. I think sort of our bhag back when we first started with the APB was to, was to create a fully autonomous business so we can obviously step back a little bit more and let guys, you know, run the business for us effectively and we can worry about strategy and growing and give ourselves a bit of leverage and work out where we want to go after that. Our first goal is to get it to run autonomously for sure. And then after that we, I guess we'll work out what we want to do, whether we want to go to, you know, push into new locations or we're happy just to do run what we, what we've got going and yeah, we're hitting our targets. That's. Yeah, yeah. Our first, first goal is definitely our to get things running autonomously and our company manual is going to be able to provide that.

That's cool. Yeah. I won't share the name but Andy, our head coach just shared that one of his clients who you mentioned earlier in this podcast, I think some people probably know who he is, just took a six week holiday after, you know, getting through all the stuff that you guys are doing now, which is pretty amazing.

Yeah, I actually heard his podcast actually. I think it was with Dave Jennings from.

Oh yeah, yeah. I introduced those guys together. Yeah.

Yeah. I've had a blanket day doing business about systemology. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

And then here he was talking about his six week holiday. So. Yeah, definitely part of the dream that take, take that long off.

Yeah. Dave Jennings is talking at Summit this year actually. That'd be cool.

Yes, that'd be good. In Sydney. Yes, I'll be there. So looking forward to that again. Hopefully I don't get made out to look like a monkey again.

We'll look after you. Anyway, Matt, awesome to have a chat. Thanks for sharing so much about Crown Constructions and everything you've been doing. Love what you're doing and I'm following your story very closely. But yeah, appreciate everything you're doing. So thanks for coming on the show today.

No worries. Thanks.

Will also a big thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.

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