172. Elite Mentoring Results in 2024 With Andy Skarda

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder's Secrets. In this episode, I interview APB's head coach, Andy Scarner. Today we talk about the elite mentoring results from 2024. Our elite clients are at the very top of their game and they're pushing towards achieving goals in both their business and their personal life. We look at their shifts in gross margin, revenue, net margin, as well as some of the personal gains they made in 2024. And most importantly for all the listeners out there, we take a look at the tactics they used to achieve those results. I hope you enjoy today's episode. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope, end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus Root will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner directory.

Who literally grew 123% revenue growth year on year. We also measure, particularly in the Elite space. We do it in our business coaching as well, but it's a real feature in Elite, we measure the builder's fixed expense so the overhead number to their revenue number as a ratio. And this is one that we don't actually want to grow, we want it to go down because that's where the headroom comes that allows their net profit to increase. So we saw fixed expense to revenue ratio drop from an average of 16% to 11.1%. Foreign.

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 APB's head coach, Andy Scarter. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Will. Nice to have you. I think it's my first one of 2025, so happy new Year to you and to everybody out there and hope that it's going to be an incredibly prosperous one for all of us.

Absolutely. Well, it's always a joy to have you on, Andy, so I'm glad we're starting off 2025 in the right way. I'm really excited for today's topic. We're talking about our top echelon of clients, those in the Elite mentoring program and the results they experienced in 2024. For anyone that is interested, you can look back at the 2023 episode about this number 120 actually. And this will be number 172. So we've actually stuck to our one a week for the last year, which is nice.

There we go.

And if you want more about Elite mentoring itself, episode 91 is a great place to dive in. But Andy, for those new to this concept, can you just give a brief overview of what elite mentoring is?

Sure. I mean, I think most people that have been around the podcast for longer than five minutes will know that we are a business coaching company. We specialize in working with custom home builders, renovators and remodelers. What we've discovered is that different people need different kinds of help and essentially that help pretty much follows the stages that a building business owner goes through in their ownership journey, if I can call it that. So we found that a lot of people that join the APB are still on the tools, but they've realized that if they really want to get somewhere with their business, they've got to get off the tools. So effectively we talk about them being self employed in that first stage. What then tends to happen is for those of them that are ready to move, they move into our business coaching cohort. And if I was going to summarize what we're doing there, we kind of moving them from being that self employed person to becoming the general manager of the business. So they're starting to bring team members on to help them. They starting to systemize parts of the business, the business is starting to grow beyond what they could do on their own and then they get to a point where they now want to take the next step which is to move into owning the business, if you like, becoming the CEO, the chief executive officer rather than working in the business. And elite mentoring is really focused on that last step. It's on, it's on moving them from managing the business and generally being involved to some degree in at least one tactical discipline, moving them out of that completely that the business day to day can function without them. That basically it, it'll run, it will produce all of its targets, whether those are financial or anything else, without the owner having to physically touch anything on a day to day basis. So that's, that's kind of the summary we, we work, we have at, at the APB discovered the, the, let's call it the, the, the, the ten way points on a builder's journey through that, that process. We find that most people that come into elite are at about professional builder level three or four and most guys get to that level relatively quickly. We find that's when things slow down because that is when you've now got multiple parts of the business needing to be developed simultaneously. And Elite is really focused on moving people from professional builder level level 4 to professional builder level 10 as quickly as their circumstances allow them to get it. So that, that's kind of an overview of what it's all about. It's, it's not for the faint hearted. It's pretty intense. We meet every single week. We take a holistic view on their lives as a whole, not just the business it really is. It's for that top echelon of builder that is committed to changing his family's financial future and living the kind of life that he wants.

Yeah, great. And it's a great summary and I think it's important to recognize as well that we only have the two intakes into Elite every year, so we can really focus the energy of the coaches on those new Elite clients that come on board.

Absolutely, yeah. And we limit, obviously we limit the numbers as well, which is a big part of it. Right.

Well, for anyone that wants to know more about the professional builder levels which you just mentioned, we'll include a link to them in the show notes. But I think what everyone listening is probably most interested about, other than understanding what Elite is, that whole concept of taking a step back and the business running by itself, I think sounds very enticing. So do you want to dive into a bit more about how you methodically track the results of Elite mentoring clients so that they can reach that outcome?

So what we've done over the years is we've distilled the mountain of data that a builder could look at down to the nitty gritty that really matters. All right. And what that effectively means is that we don't want to turn a builder into an accountant. We find that most builders have a sense of humor, which would make it a bit difficult to actually achieve that. And all the accountants now hate me. I'm just joking. Accountants. But you wouldn't understand that. But anyway, let's not go there. We don't want to turn them into marketing specialists, but we want them to have a fundamental understanding of each of those things and most importantly, be able to measure the results that they're getting from each part of their business. So we created basically a workbook for them to use at the business coaching level, which we call our KPI workbook. And basically in that workbook we have every single measurement tool that we've ever created in every discipline that a builder could ever need, but it's focused on what's necessary. It doesn't go into the frivolous stuff that is irrelevant. And it's, it's really summarizing everything that's in the other systems. So it kind of, it, if you like, it's. I don't want to call it a dashboard because one of the worksheets is actually a dashboard, but it is a summary document that brings what's happening in different parts of the business into one place so that the business owner can focus on what's important, not what's possible. That is used by every one of our business coaching clients. And it is also used that we use exactly the same document with our Elite clients. What a lot of our Elite clients add to that, because they've now built their team, they now add what they call a tactical KPI workbook where that is focused very much on the individual disciplines and what is happening there at a more granular level. So we've got those two running. And then to add to that, I mentioned earlier that part of what we do in Elite is we take it to a whole life scenario. Our focus there really being it's critically important that the builder, that the company owner is physically, mentally and emotionally healthy and doing well. Okay. Mindset is a huge part of this. And as unfortunately, some of our members have experienced, in fact, in the last year, physical illness can seriously derail the plans that a builder has. All right, so we were acknowledging that there's no way that we're going to achieve the business success if we don't achieve the success in their personal lives as well. And because of that, we move the focus there, as I said, to their physical health, their mental health, their spiritual health. We look at their primary relationships as in their significant others, their relationships with their children, their parents, their siblings, those kind of things to make sure that the business at the very least, is not negatively affecting those things. If we can actually take it to a positive, what we're trying to do is to structure the business in such a way that it positively supports all of those things. So I know we'll get into some of the actual data in a short while. That little things like how regularly is this builder getting to the gym? How regularly is this builder. You and I will appreciate this. I have one Elite client at the moment who's committed to running the Bay run in Sydney three times a week. Now, that's a very specific outcome, but the point being that unless you're intentional about those things, if you don't put those things in your calendar, they're never going to happen. All right, so what does that mean? Well, it's quite simple. When he's out huffing and puffing on the bay run, he can't be sitting in a meeting with a client. He can't be costing a job. He can be listening to this podcast and you know who you are. So if you're listening to this podcast, if he is required 11 hours a day in the business, then he's not getting to the bay run. And if he's not getting to the bay run, then he's probably putting on more weight than he needs. He's not sleeping as much as he should. He's irritable. Because he's irritable, his wife has to slap him around more than normal because that's happening. He's not a happy person. It literally, there's the spiral that if we don't get those things taken care of. I think I mentioned this the last time because it's one that's, that's really close to my heart. We get a lot of people talking about the fact that their dad loved them and cared for them, but he was never there. He was working as fingers to the bone. What happens with this kind of next generation is a lot of them come into the elite program saying, I almost don't care what else we do, but I need to pick up my kids from preschool kindy twice a week. What does that do that works to help them with their mindset? Obviously, we encourage things like no mobile phone date nights with your significant other. And we plot those, we plan where they're going to go. And so it's really those things. We have a completely separate workbook where on a quarterly at the beginning of the year, we plan those things and then we monitor those through the weekly sessions to some degree. But then also obviously we do a review session once a quarter, see how those are tracking, adjust if we need to, and then obviously go from there. So it's, it's really a combination of obviously, the coaching sessions, but in those coaching sessions, we are jumping between the normal KPI workbook, a tactical KPI workbook, and then the whole life KPI workbook, which then gives us the complete overview. Right.

So it sounds like really what you're doing is helping builders understand what their personal aspirations are and aligning their business objectives and therefore the activity around all those things to those personal aspirations.

Absolutely. You've nailed it in one. And, and, and taking into account the fact that They've only got 168 hours to be successful in all of those every week. So it's, it's, it's literally making sure that, I mean, really the way we would probably describe it is making sure that they focused on what's important, not on what is urgent. That's probably the summary.

Okay, well, let's dive into some of the results then. I think we can look at them in two different ways from a business perspective. And then we can dive into some of those personal wins as well, because I think that's what everyone will be quite interested in too.

Sure.

But if we start with business, that's probably what's going to attract the broader audience when we're talking about revenue and profit and those type of things. So do you want to kick start with some of the milestones from the elite clients in 2024 from that perspective?

And just because I am who I am, I'm going to be slightly contentious and different here in that I'm going to acknowledge upfront that in these kind of discussions we tend to go to all the top level positive things. Not everything's been positive for every Elite member this year. The realities that every builder is facing around, you know, increased costs and inflation and all of those things. Elite clients are not immune from those, unfortunately. So I'm going to do both. I'm going to talk about some of the people that didn't do so well, but how Elite actually helped them as well in the whole process. But let's start with the positive thing. So. And I'll kind of just run through the sort of benchmark KPIs that we look at on an ongoing basis. Most builders will understand why revenue is important. This is a staggering number when you look at it just kind of as the average. But across the elite cohort, we saw revenues grow by an average of 69.3%. Now why I said I'm going to balance this is. It's easy just to leave it there. But I think it's a worthwhile idea to let everybody understand how did we end up at that average? The lowest year on year growth that we had was 27.5% increase in revenue. The highest we had was 123%. All right, so we had one elite client and it was one who literally grew 123% revenue growth year on year. The other one that stands out is around the 83%. But those are the kind of numbers, but as I say, the lowest in terms of these numbers was 27.5%. We then cascade from revenue down to gross margin on average, up by 5.25% lowest, 3% highest, 8%. All right, so that's net margin. That's kind of where the. Sorry, that's gross margin. That's where we, what we building is generating those kind of numbers. When we get to net, it's even more interesting because here we saw an average of 5.75% across the board. And now this is the bottom line. So here again, we had 3% growth as the lowest and we had 9% as the highest. Now in reality, those three numbers, revenue, gross profit and net profit, particularly with the emphasis on net profit, because that's obviously, if we talk about a holistic life scenario, we talk about changing people's financial futures, that's the number that's really going to make the difference. So between 3 and 9% there. We also measure, particularly in the Elite space, we do it in our business coaching as well. But it's a real feature in Elite. We measure the builder's fixed expense. So the overhead number to their revenue number as a ratio. And this is one that we don't actually want to grow, we want it to go down because that's where the headroom comes, that allows their net profit to increase. So we saw fixed expense to revenue ratio drop from an average of 16% to 11.1%. That is partly where that 5% growth in, in net margin comes from. Because as they push up the revenue and drop the overhead, that's where that, that net margin comes from.

Oh, so just before you move on from those numbers, just to clarify the net margins and gross margins, you're talking, that's not the, that's not the net margin. 5.75%. You're talking about growth on their current net margin for the year, correct?

Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. So, so we, for example, we had people at 8%, they're now at 13. Yeah, we had people at 6%, they now at 12. That, that kind of, that's the growth in that percentage. That's not the percentage. If we look at the fixed expense to revenue, as I say, that dropped to 11.1. I looked at cash reserves, I looked at, you know, has, have these differences in profitability actually translated into bank accounts. We've moved the average bank account number from round about the 200k average up to 900k average, if you like. That's the real terms, in real terms scenario of what, what that's turned into, what some people might be kind of interested in is what has caused this? Where has this come from? Two primary things, marketing, which I know will make your heart glad. And systemization. There's been a lot of work done in building company manuals and those kind of things. And it's been the place where we've had. When I've gone back and looked at where did we invest most. Marketing as a. As a cost to the business was probably the one specific place. What that turned into was average contract value across the group rose from 499k average a year ago to 1.4 million average a year later. Those are kind of the numbers. If we go back to what we're talking about earlier in terms of the professional builder levels, we've had another builder go to level 10, which is obviously the top. The top level. That's the place at which we certify the builders as professional builders. We've got another one that is knocking on the door. Literally when I say knocking on the door. I'm waiting for the finalization of their December numbers. And once those are confirmed to be accurate, there'll be the second one moving to level 10. And then there are another two that are rising rapidly as in their progress across the year has been quite amazing. The next ones are not really. There've been some interesting kind of sub achievements in the year as well. There's been an elite client who developed his company manual. Then he took that company manual and he converted that into an app that he now uses to run his business internally. And the plan medium term is to actually make that app available as a commercial app to other builders to kind of help people to. To fast track that process, which was pretty interesting. The other one that I found particularly interesting is that we have an elite client who is developing a project management robot using AI. So literally getting to the place where there'll be an autonomous machine out there, actually checking the sites and making sure that everything is running on site according to how it should. That's been pretty interesting to actually have a. In fact, I think the. The official term for it is it's a cobot. It's a collaborative robot is the way it's described. And I mean if again it's. It's in its early developmental stages. But when he talks about the specifications that the data that this thing will be able to provide, it's obviously a lot of it is driven by AI, but it's absolutely incredible the kind of information that will be available in real time off a building site with nobody on the site literally able to kind of monitor that site completely remotely with this little R2D2 buzzing around the site. Those are the kind of this. The particular builder that developed the app, for example, was doing the work on his company manual anyway, and he just looked at this and went, you know what? If I was to take this and convert it into something that my project managers and supervisors and so on could use, that's going to make my life a lot easier. Which is then what he went and did, which is a wonderful kind of side benefit, if you like, of having done the work on the company manual. I'm ready to go to the not so happy picture. Anything you want to talk about in any of those numbers?

Yeah, I'm intrigued about one in particular. So you mentioned that the average contract value jumped from $499,000 to $1.4 million. That's. That's almost a tripling of contract value, which I imagine has tied into why revenue has increased so much for the building companies, but kind of glazed over the fact that, oh, that was attributed to marketing. Talk to me more about how they actually. What did they do in marketing that helped them increase the average contract value by so much?

Two fundamental things. One, absolute clarity on niche. So nothing vague. Very, very focused, Very, very clear. A really solid understanding of what makes their ideal client tick. So literally getting to the point. And it's, it's. It's almost the holy grail of marketing to some degree when, when I look at the guys that have really put the time and the effort into it, testing messaging, but measuring it on a weekly basis, putting out an ad, analyzing the results, tweaking one bit of it, putting it back out again, making sure that they look at the difference. Not a cheap exercise, as you will know. The changes and the benefits are very small increments each time, but across a year, all that learning and all that development and probably as much in this space of learning what's not working and stopping doing that. Because the problem is, for a lot of builders where there isn't a comprehensive understanding of those things, they end up very much in the hands of marketing agencies and people. The builder doesn't feel that he's in a place where he can argue. He's told by this guy that this is the thing that's going to work and you need to give me $4,000 a month and I will bring you 10 million leads. He doesn't need 10 million leads. And unfortunately, 9,999,999 are not his avatar. So when we've been able to get that really clear and then start to speak to those people, so that we've got a higher percentage of the correct clients coming into the funnel. That converts into more concepts, more prelims, more sales. You'll know that one of the benchmarks we teach is that you need two prelims to every contract. Now what's happened with the guys that have invested in. So both the time and the money in their marketing is they now are at. They are closing 99% of their prelims. So all of a sudden they don't need 10 to get five contracts anymore. They only need six to get five contracts. And those contracts a year ago with 500,000, the contracts now 1.5 average. So again, you know, when we averaging it, I'm thinking one particular elite client, he made the decision two years ago that his business plan was 10 contracts at a million dollars year. That's where he wants the business to be sitting. By focusing on moving his average contract value from that 500 to a million. What's actually happened is it's gone beyond a million. And what he's now finding is that he's building 2 million, $3 million contracts. And because of that and because he's kept his margins where they need to be, he's building less houses but making more money, if that makes sense. So that's really where it's been. It's such a personal, unique scenario. You know, you can, sure, you can do the generic marketing things and you'll get generic results. When you are able to put in the time and the money to focus on it and get it really, really humming, the return on that investment is staggering, you know, so that's been really where the major change has come.

Yeah. Cool. Thanks for sharing. Well, as you mentioned before, it hasn't been all rosy in the industry in particular, but also for our elite clients. So did you want to touch on some of that stuff?

So one particular elite client, I'm trying to think. There've been a couple of movies that I've watched in my life that I've kind of the. The first thing goes wrong in the plot of the movie and you feel sorry for the guy. And then, then the next thing goes. And then the next thing goes. And then the next thing goes. And you get to the point of saying, what else could go wrong? And then something else goes wrong. And one client in particular, the absolute most bizarre set of unpredictable circumstances that I. I've ever heard of. And I've been around a while, as you know, so it was just literally one thing after the other. Everything that, that he kind of predicted would happen. Didn't. Contracts fell over because marriages failed, people got sick, people got diagnosed with terminal illnesses. All of a sudden, an issue that happened decades ago in a business came to the fore from a tax perspective, which froze all of that person's assets. It was, it was literally like this tragedy that you almost got to the point of going like, there's no, there's just this can't happen to one person. But unfortunately it did. Now, did they grow? No. Did they go backwards? No. Did they go out of business? No. And I think the reality is, is that if they hadn't been part of the group, because that's the other part of that we don't talk about, is that a lot of the guys who've been in the group for a while are very close to each other. So there's a lot of peer influence and discussion in this thing. And then obviously, because of the fact that I meet with and all of the coaches that have elite clients, we meet with them every single week. It means that there is regularly an ear to listen and an objective ear which obviously weakened from the outside. We can often see solutions that they can't see because they're actually in it, you know? Right, right in the depth of it. So there were two people that. The other one was not as tragic, but what really happened was they came into the beginning of last year on the back of what was a very positive wave in 2023, but it didn't translate or continue into 2024. And that gave them the first six months of last year, very, very difficult situation. But we came up with a plan and we executed that plan over the year. And going into 2025, whole different picture because of what they did in 2024, they didn't just throw their hands up and give up, which they were tempted to do on a couple of occasions. They stuck to it. They stuck, went back to the basics and literally worked their tails off. But the beauty again was because of that, it set this year up to be a lot more positive. And again, we do all of our planning on three year cycles. It's looking very much like although 2024 was not great, the three year cycle will even out because of the work that they did and that'll obviously get them back into the kind of positive place that they want to. And then this might sound bad, but it actually isn't in the particular circumstances. We had two people leave the elite program. On the face of it, you'd go, why would they do that? Well, they did it for the best reason possible. And that is the. They had got to the point that they are comfortable, They've put everything in place they need to put in place. They are comfortable. They can now make this thing run from here onwards. And from a coaching perspective, there's no higher accolade than a client saying to you, I came to you with a problem, you've helped me solve the problem, you've put me on the right track. Thank you very much. Bye for now. So that's, that's kind of two of the others that have happened there. So that's, that's kind of a. A picture. And I'm deliberately wanting to make sure that I don't pretend that it's all rosy out there. It isn't always rosy. Obviously, having the support of the elite program has been very positive for the guys that have had a bit of a difficult year.

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you sharing the other side of it because it just wouldn't be believable otherwise. All right, talk to me about flow on effect of those business results and how that's impacted some of the elite clients and their quality of life.

These are interesting. And I kind of went and cherry picked a cross section for you just to kind of show everybody just how much detail we go into. So we've had a body fat reduction from 21% body fat to 15% body fat. People may look at that and go, well, what's that got to do with business? Well, the reality is that person is healthier. That person is in a way better place than what they were a year ago. And obviously that has been. We're measuring it in terms of their body fat percentage because that's what was important to them. So again, kind of mindset as the reality. One of the other guys actually wanted to spend more quality time with his wife, but also needed to get some additional physical exercise up and running. And we basically came up with a process where they could combine those two things. So they now have a Friday morning personal trainer workout for the two of them and they literally go to gym together, do a gym session and then have a breakfast together. And then she gets on with her day and he goes back to the office. He's in the office by kind of 10 o' clock in the morning. But it's done both of their physical health, the world of good. It's also great for their relationship. And obviously, as I said particularly the mindset is a big deal. I did mention to you earlier that a number of people are very keen on. On making sure that they are present as parents. And we've seen across the board that kind of interaction happening on a regular basis. You know, dads picking up the kids from. From Kindy or from school twice a week and then going and doing something fun with them on those two afternoons. We had one particular client who managed. He hadn't had an annual holiday basically for four years before he came into Elite, and he managed to have two holidays last year, literal holidays where he was away. Part of what I got him to do was to turn off his email. And the motivation to get him to do that was him getting to a place of confidence that he understood that if what we were doing was working, there shouldn't be any need for him to check his email. When he turned his email back on when he got home, there were problems that would highlight for us very specifically where we needed to put some attention. So it's a wonderful kind of mental turnaround from. I have to be available all the time. I'm deliberately going to see where this thing breaks. And if I can see where it breaks, then I obviously know where I need to go in terms of actually fixing it. So that was quite interesting. We would. One Elite client whose daughter is doing incredibly well in her soccer career, he and his wife had both the financial means and the time opportunity to be able to invest in that actually growing over the year. As I mentioned, we do put a fair amount of emphasis on relationships with significant others across the board every quarter, but very close to no mobile phone dates, husband and wife only, no kids. And then the offshoot of that is dedicated dad and daughter time, dedicated dad and son time. Kind of once a quarter, twice a quarter. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? People have been quad bike riding, people have been ice creaming, ax throwing, you know, you name it, those kind of things. And really the. The underlining thing here is it's intentional, it's. It's actually part of making sure that those relationships get the attention that they need. Two golf handicaps, significant improvement, half of a private pilot's license completed, which was a particular desire of one of the clients. They've always wanted to learn to fly. And obviously they had both the financial means again and the time opportunity to be able to go out there and actually do that. So that's a. Some of that may sound a little bit fluffy to some people, but what you've got to be able to do is kind of look at all of that is against the backdrop of all of those businesses continue to Perform positively and in most cases, extreme improvements as well as those things actually happening in their individual lives.

I feel like one of those goals might be yours. You've waved it in there, just dropped an Easter egg in the middle somewhere.

No, unfortunately not. I have to be honest and say maybe because of all the reasons that we teach other people, you know, they say a mechanics car is always the worst. I haven't got to gym anywhere near as much this last year as I would have liked to, but it's on the list for this year, so we'll see.

Keeping it up from what I hear. So that's all that matters. All right, well, looking forward at 2025, what is on the horizon for our elite clients and everything that you're saying?

Well, I guess the summary is lots more of the same. You know, it is one thing that we've been very fortunate over the last decade to realize that it doesn't matter whether you're a builder in Australia or New Zealand or Canada or the United States. Pretty much all of our fundamental desires are the same in terms of wanting to improve ourselves and, you know, the future for our families and all of those things. And the advantage in that is that the solution that works in North America will work just as well in, in, you know, Anz, and vice versa. So continuing to work on those things. Our focus, as I mentioned, is relatively structured in terms of the professional builder levels. So literally working through those. A word that has come up a lot in the early part of 2025 has been focus. Making sure that elite clients are focused on the things that are going to move the needle. You know, it's very easy, particularly when the business is starting to grow to be very busy. What we want to make sure is that. Busy at what? Busy doing the things that are going to move the needle and measurably move them closer to the goals that they've set for this particular year. The marketing thing that we touched on earlier, I think is going to remain a focus because we've had such great results, you know, from the, from the guys that have really put in the time and effort to kind of roll that out a bit more universally across the group and then really staying focused on those systems, making sure that, that people are setting themselves up to get out of the tactical day to day stuff and actually work more in the, in the strategic. And if we can do that, I think what we'll start or not start to see, what we'll continue to see is the gross and net margins that we saw this year. I think that'll continue to happen more universally. If I was going to put a sort of target on it, I would very much like to see us come out of this year with at least four certified professional builders in addition to the ones that we already have. So that's, that's kind of what it's looking like at, at this year. There's a relative amount of positive outlook. I think the political changes in the United States have made some already some positive things in terms of that market. We starting to see interest rates come down in the United States and Canada. They've also started to come down in New Zealand. Everybody in Australia is hanging on by their fingertips just, you know, let's see it happen in Australia as well. If that, if that kind of macroeconomic picture shifts more positively, I think we'll see it happen a lot easier. But there's certainly no reason for us to be concerned. I think the general overview is more of the same, more positive stuff.

Perfect. Well, it looks like an exciting 2025 is ahead and I look forward to having this conversation with you in 12 months time.

Fantastic.

Andy, thanks for coming on. Where do you think the best place for people to find out more information about elite mentoring is?

I know we've got a very well put together because you did it info pack on the website. That is obviously the simplest place. If you're not yet a member of the apb, I blatantly bang the drum. You should be. So you know, that would be a starting point. But certainly if you are a member, business coaching is kind of the next step up. And obviously for all of our business coaching clients, speak to your coach. Every one of our coaches is able to offer the elite program as part of what they do. So if you want, if you're internal, talk to your coach. If you're external, jump on our website and you can read through the whole info pack there.

And to your point, it's not for everyone and it's not for every stage of your journey as well. You may not be quite at that level. So that's not a bad thing. It's just, it's just a situation.

I mean we'd, we would, we would obviously like every member to be working towards going into coaching and we'd like every coaching member to be working towards elite. You're right, it's a journey. It's a particular thing for a particular part of the journey. Great.

Well, I'll include all those links in the show notes so everyone can check out more information. But Andy, thanks once again for coming on the podcast.

Very welcome. Thank you for having me.

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, your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.