202. Systemising For Growth With Reegan Cusworth

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder's Secrets. In this episode, I interview Regan Cusworth from Rebuild. Regan is a fourth generation builder who's gone from working with his dad to running a thriving business alongside his partner Taylor. In this episode, he shares how they've systemized their business and their operations to take on bigger, higher quality jobs without burning out. Keep listening to find out how you can apply the same principles to create a building company that runs without you, earns you more and delivers better results for your clients. 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 weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus 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.

I want to be overall the business, but I also don't want to be the person in every role because if I am, then I can't do the things I want to do. And that's why we run a business. Like I want to be flexible enough to go take a Friday and Monday off. We're not here to work with people we don't want to work with. We're here to keep giving good outcomes and a good experience and, and build a quality home.

Just by you asking those questions has made me trust you more as a builder. If I see that through your content already, then by the time I get to a discovery meeting, I'm already way ahead.

Yeah, people don't think about it, but they don't really know what they want. They see all these videos and photos of a finished product and go, I want this fancy bathroom. Don't realize it's four times the size you really need, asking the right questions. It really comes down to that a help people get the home they want and I'll get the business from them and the money that I need and the lifestyle that I need to run my family and buy the things I want to buy on the weekends and holidays I want to do. So. It's a pretty powerful one, that one.

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder Secrets.

I'm your host Will Blunt and today.

I'm joined by Regan Cusworth from Rebuild. Regan, welcome to the show.

Hey, mate, how you doing?

Very well, very well. I've just got back from a hotel in Fiji for a week actually. But you've been very busy by the sounds of it. So tell me a bit more about rebuild and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah, so I am a fourth generation carpenter and builder on both sides of the family. We've been running the business now since 2012. First originally we started with my dad. We started the business up after he closed down a business that he was running. And we basically started with small projects, decks and small bathrooms and stuff. And then we moved on to, as people would ask you go, oh, can we do this bigger renovation or this extension or this house raise? And yeah, now we're here today. Where dad stepped back from the business back in October and my partner Taylor had a bit of an opportunity. She wasn't really liking where she was working and thought she'd give her to try and see if we can work together so we can get a bit of a better maybe lifestyle because that's why people generally run their own business. And yeah, so she's with us today. We now run the building company together and yeah, we specialize in renovations, extensions, alterations, go from there, knock down rebuilds occasionally, but not very much.

Yeah, cool. So you used to work with your dad and that only ended October last year. How have you found, like, what did you learn about working with family and then kind of transitioning to something a bit more different?

Yeah, it's good. It has positives, negatives and obviously everything in between. Working with dad for so many years, living with him growing up, we clash a lot, but we also put our heads together when it comes down to it and have generally get the best outcome for everyone. Sometimes it can be too nice. You can be played upon a little bit sometimes by being too nice and giving too much away. And. And then, yeah, now with Taylor, the dynamics a little bit different. We've got a different personality structure. Started understanding a bit of personalities of a couple years ago and where dad's personality and mine were exactly the same as why we clashed so hard. But then we were very different because of generational gap. You know, I'm 33, dad's 68, so there's a bit of a gap there with probably a little bit more than most. Sometimes that would lead to us going, oh, I want to take the business this way. And this is why. And dad would like, oh, well, that stuff worked before, it'll still work now. And as probably most of you know, it doesn't quite happen like that anymore. You can't. There's principles that can be applied, but you still can't run A business even a couple of years ago, the same way you ran it 50 years ago or next year, it's changing. So with Taylor now in the business, the dynamics a bit closer. She's a few years younger than me, but she comes from more of an admin background. Systems Processes holds us accountable quite good. And in the office when you've got myself, Scritch and Taylor. Scritch and I are very similar. Taylor's different personality. So it lends itself to our strengths and weaknesses really well. So we're finding that really good at the moment. So yeah.

Is that your other business partner that you mentioned then?

Scritch? No, he's our office admin. He works on the pre construction. So what I've tried to do and a lot of people maybe a little bit different, a lot of the builders tend to be still heavily involved in all the pre construction plans, design and the first initial meetings and everything. And I felt that's probably a bit of a different scenario. Like I don't, I want to be over all the business, but I also don't want to be the person in every role because if I am, then I can't do the things I want to do. And that's why we run a business. Like I want to be flexible enough to go and take a Friday and Monday off like we're doing this weekend. Whereas if I'm the person doing the leads and stuff and I have to, I want to go away, I want to take a week off, a month off. Someone has to be in that position. So what we've done is it worked really well. So Scritch has been in the business for a couple of years. He has been taught the whole business from the admin point of view. And then when Taylor came on, she was better for working on the construction side. Whereas the technical side that Scritch had learned over the last couple of years being side by side with me, he's now taken that role really well. He's a very good problem solver, very much like me. So when it comes down to something that's technical from a design and pre construction and engineering and something that isn't in the exact system of running our pre construction, he's very good at moving and going, okay, well this is what we can do and this is another scenario or coming back to me and touching base with me about it. So whereas Taylor's very works down the system top to bottom. If there's a problem, no offense to her, it's a little bit of a problem. She's like, I don't know how to deal with this. So. Which is good. That's better for a construction period because she pulls people back into that system and the checklists of quality control and stuff, which is what we're working on heavily now we've gotten more jobs to site.

Yeah. How did you set him up for success? Because I imagine a lot of that stuff at some point was either in your dad's head or your head or.

That's. Yeah, that's funny because, yeah, a lot of it was sitting side by side with me, which is probably not the way to do it. And now I've now realized that in the last couple of years, the best way is to probably document, write it, video chords, some stuff, that kind of thing. A lot of it was just sitting side by side with me day in, day out for weeks, like months on end, really, for a good 12 months. Scritch probably spent 80% of his time with me. So whenever I was in the office, he was side by side. He'd ask me questions. He's really good at that. But in future, like now we're starting to go back through our sales process. I'm starting to document things. So I'll start with the first set of hierarchies and I'll go, okay, well, this is the main big steps. And then I'll go back through and I'll do the second steps. Okay, so each one of these has three or four steps in it. Okay, what's that one? Then I'll go through and do really detailed. Okay, this is how we all want things done. But now that Scritch has been with it for so long, I'm not doing it by myself. I'm going through with Scritch. I might do the overview. Then the second part will sit down and we pull out. Because I don't do it every day. I did one discovery meeting yesterday, which is probably the first I've had in months. Scritch generally does them. I went and did one because he was. He was off at another meeting and stuff like that. So I'm still able to do them when the location might be a bit closer to my house than his, for example, or the type of build is really intricate or a really old school build, which he hasn't done a lot of before. So it might be a real colonial place. Like we're working on a house that was built in 1890, heritage listed and everything you can think of. So they become really technical. You've got to really stick your head in. And then there's projects that are multimillion dollar new stuff that we're being brought from that might have to take over from other builders so that aren't doing the right thing.

Yeah. Imagine those discovery calls for renovations. Compared to like a new build, for example, they're more complicated. Right. Because you're dealing with so many different environments.

They are. I get a bit caught up sometimes, and this is where it's been a bit of a benefit. Someone like Scritch, who's not a builder, has worked really well. I would go into a discovery meeting and sometimes spend an hour or two hours on site, and then we'd end up going through all the finer details that the designer would have to go through in next meeting that we're getting paid for. Whereas Scritch can sometimes come into the meeting and look at it from the systems and process point of view. And this is what I need to get to you to give you the proposal for our prelim one. So yesterday I went to one, which is the first time in a while, and the client goes, yeah, I got the information script sent out to me. I've read the print and that sounds fantastic. I was there like 20 minutes max. They understood the process. They're looking at, like taking the whole lid off the house. And I was like. I look back and go, hey, it worked. It's finally starting to work and things are starting to click. It's all meshing together well and it's really cool to see that. I've been to a meeting after not being a lot of discoveries and that system has played itself out the right way. So it's really good to see.

So he's following a script for that discovery meeting and a checklist, is that right?

Yeah. So in our qualifying call or discovery call, we've got a set of questions. Those questions are reasonably close ended. They're quite thought out because renovations are very difficult. Like, obviously we don't have to ask where their land is or if they own it because they're building the house on the ground. So our questions are a little bit tailored and towards the end of the call we go, okay, great. We're a good fit to work together because we don't want to waste anyone's time. They don't want to waste our time. Right. So we do that. And then unlike some of the new people that might have their own office or they build new builds off the plan or really custom homes, our discovery meetings in house, we always go to them because we want to have a Look at what condition the house is in. Tells you a lot about someone, how they live, what's around the house, what's not, how messy it might be, how tidy they are. And then the biggest part that we try to focus on in our discovery meeting on site is what they're actually looking for from a build. A lot of people come to us and go, here's the sketches I made and this is what I want the layout to look like. And you go, hang on. Hey, well, you've gone too far. Just let me know how many bedrooms and bathrooms and why you want it bigger. Do you want an extra rumpus room? Are the kids like on top of you and you want your own private living room or whatnot. So we're looking at it from what does the whole house need to now fit that it didn't fit when you first bought it or first lived in it? You know, one of the projects we did last year, they've got two kids, they're like late single digits are almost teens. The house was four bedroom. They're all on top of each other. So now we've. We go to the garage, turned it into the master ensuite, walk in robe, open the whole living plan up at the house. Kids are on the other end of the house, parents are at one end, guest bedroom open. They've got now an extra kid's rumpus room that turns out to be dad's gaming room. So that disappeared pretty quickly. And yeah, it's, it's looking at the hobby picture. You've got to look at the whole. Yeah, plays Pokemon and stuff in the front room for the kids now. So. And he's my, he's older than me, so yeah, it's amazing how people use their homes and stuff and what age it is. Like that place would have only been 20, early 2000s brick house. Yet we've worked with places that are 60s, 50s.

Can you take me back up a level in your, I guess, your process? So we're talking at the discovery level, like once you've already got a lead or an opportunity and you're having a conversation and meeting with them, how are you getting those opportunities initially?

So we're now starting to work on our marketing and advertising a bit more. We had a small stint last year that it wasn't quite targeted as much as we liked. It was probably targeting slightly the wrong audience in the right, the wrong capture. But going back, having a look at it, able to look at what worked, what didn't work. It gave us a chance to Refine that. So we're now going in. We're about to. After this, I'm going to be shooting a couple of videos to explaining the prelim process, educating the clients a bit more, telling them how we do things so that when we come to meetings that they already know that they've already like going, okay, this is. This is who I'm going to be working with. This is how it's going to be done. Like, there's no questions. We can get right into it, we can get stuck into it. So we're going through that. We're going to start with a bit of advertising through social media and stuff like that. And then we had a new website designed at the start of the year, which is super stoked about. It's a. It's a bit different. I don't think I've seen many people do it from a construction side. It's a bit of a background from an E commerce thing where you hover over a photo or a detail of a photo and allows you to dive into that particular feature or why a design feature was chosen. So I'm really keen to, as we get more projects and finish them all, to go in and give more people more information about why people do things. I think that's one of the coolest parts about what we're going to be doing going forward.

Yeah. For background, when we were off there. That's why you're in the workshop now, because we were trying to record this in the studio.

And this is. This is awesome. Yeah, I love this little place. So this is one of our staff scriptures. This is his home workshop. He loves it down here. He builds custom guitars and anything you can think in his spare time. He loves working with his hands and keeping occupied. So this place is awesome and it's a great, great place to take shoots like this. And. Yeah.

So in terms of the. The things you're creating about the prelim process, the content. Sorry. And how you're advertising on social media and things like that. How do you know who you want to target? Like, what's your ideal customer?

So, yeah, that was. That was a tricky one to try and narrow down because we'd been very vague for a long period of time and we'd only really run off referrals. So it's taken a few iterations and working with, you know, mentors, the books I read, like, you know, Homozy and everything like that to narrow it down to clients that have already done something before generally, or really thorough client that is looking or a lead that's looking for someone that's quite detailed because generally speaking, you don't know a good builder potentially unless you've dealt with a bad or a good one before. Right. So you've got to have some context to understand what a better process might be. And that was one of the key things that our current marketing team brought up. Right. So generally speaking, our client is a second build, second or third or more. They generally got teenage kids and they've probably bought the house when the kids were younger. And the kids are changing like the teenagers now. The house doesn't work for them anymore, or they're slightly older than that and they bought the house when the kids were teens and they're now moved out and the homes, now the parents and the kids are gone and they're like, let's redesign this place. Like Scripture's place above me. He had three or four iterations over the last 25 years. He did himself. And now the house is a. It's gone from a two bedroom to four bedroom to five bedroom, back to a two bedroom house in the same footprint it's ever been. And it's amazing. It's two bedrooms, two ensuites toilet, nice, awesome kitchen and living room space. And it's so authentic and open. It's literally like this upstairs, all the timber joists and ceilings exposed and it's fantastic. So such character, which I love building. And it just gives a great outcome. At the end of the day, everyone's happy.

Have you found that definition of your customer? Like really understanding who you want to work with, who the good customers are, all that kind of stuff. Does that help with your messaging and everything?

Oh, 100%. The messaging comes down to understanding what they are and then looking back and reviewing old clients, the ones that worked well, didn't work well. The clients that you liked working with. And at the end of the day, we're not here to work with people we don't want to work with. We're here to, to keep giving good outcomes and a good experience and build a quality home. And in the last six months, I've changed from, you know, just building and giving a good experience to upping the quality and what I'm building and why I'm building it and why we're wrapping houses and why we're doing this. When it comes to a client, understanding them and what they're after allows me to say no to the clients that we don't want to work with and that don't fit what we're doing. And how. And how much they want to spend. So that's one of the keys. Like, not everyone's going to have the money to build a high end renovation the right way. When you know, it might be as simple as they want to do a worker's cottage and they want to extend out the back. Okay. But they want to replace every window from timber to aluminum. Originally I thought, yeah, that's straightforward. Let's just put some aluminum windows in the frames, get them custom made, and then you look back and you go, hang on. That doesn't help. Any water tightness. That doesn't help insulation. It doesn't help, like moisture break and everything like that. So now I'm like, okay, well, we really should gut the whole front of the house. Let's get all the cladding off. Like, open all the windows and frames out. Put nice, like wrap the whole house, including the front part that we technically only touching the inside of. Let's wrap the whole front, reuse some of the cladding on a particular side of the house which. Which might not be as visible to the sun or show as many defects in original cladding, but let's use brand new on the sides that do. So that gives you a modern house, modern feel, vapor barriers, insulation properties. The new aluminum windows that they were already after, exponentially better product and outcome at the end of the day, because there's no point in building a nice new extension that meets all the standards or exceeds them when the front half of the house leaks air like no tomorrow and moisture and. And all that.

So bigger project for you as well.

Yeah, like, yeah, see, that's it. I'm not in there to get a bigger project for the sake of the bigger project. Right. Like, that's why we walk in. Like, some people, like, want to show me these plans and go, oh, I want to do all these bedrooms and stuff. Well, why? We've been working with one of our old neighbors from our old office, and he's got a massive big Queenslander with a big attachment on the side that they want to redo again. It's been renovated like 10 years ago. And we went there, we ended up spending two hours there because the entire renovation was just clunky. It didn't flow. Like, the design that the designer had brought to them might have been perfect and met the client's expectations and what they were asking for and all that, but because they didn't have the input of a builder and they didn't have the understanding of the whole connection, and maybe the designer didn't spend that extra little bit understanding how they want to live in the house now and how they want to live in the future. It just didn't work like it had the route. Some roof areas were left low and from the outside it would have looked like three attachments. It just was wrong. So going in, having a look, getting in early with people and looking at design and working with designers we regularly work with like, you know, Sam from Queensland Designer Home Specialized. In this last 20 years he's seen every possible Queenslander build under Rays extension, little duplexes and stuff that he occasionally does and being able to look at that, sit down with him and go, what are we tackling? Which project does it look similar to? Or do we need to start from scratch and understand how they want to live in it? Where the sun comes down, where the sun goes up in summer and in winter, you know, do they need double glaze in certain side of the house and not in the other? Because that's cost effective. So yeah, that's so many factors that people don't really think is critical but is into so much and I love being involved with more and more builders who are getting more and more clients thinking about these things and wanting the long term outcomes and benefits of building better houses and happy to pay for it because they get a fantastic result. The community of other builders is awesome. I'm more and more reaching out to them and talking to them and all that kind of stuff.

Are you answering, are you looking to answer some of these questions in the content you're creating? Like things around like you know, talking about where the sun comes up and like these kind of.

It's a tricky one because yeah, I'm, it's tricky because it's, it's a little bit new for me. I see other people do it and it's because I haven't done a lot of it. It's a bit new but I think the end of the day I just got to get out there and talk to more people, do these little videos, shoot little ones on my camera and just put them up, even if they're raw and not quite as pretty. Hopefully that the content of what I'm talking about is I catching enough that people are going, oh yeah, that's cool, that's interesting. What's, what's the next one gonna be? I'm hoping that's just where it is. Like that's what I do, that's what I go through. I've got, you know, follows many builders and pages and information as I can now. Like a couple years ago, didn't care. I just didn't follow anyone. I was like, we're doing our own thing, it's our own race, whatever, like. But at the end of the day, there's so much work to go around. Don't fight it. I see so many builders go on their websites and marketing and everything, they go, oh, I build new custom homes, renovations, extensions, bathrooms, kitchens. And I'm like, we did that five years ago. And I went, that didn't help us. Because they're trying to do so many different things, market to too many people. Like, yeah, I do knock down rebuilds. People come up to that. But that's an outcome of a potential renovation being not smart to spend that kind of money. Not what's up? Is it non cost effective? So, yeah, trying to be cost effective. And you go, hang on. Well, there's no point in doing a huge extension or this to an old house when you could knock it down. Or do we knock 80% of the house down, start from scratch? Or do we know? You know? So we did that a few years ago. We did a knockdown rebuild in America because at the end of the day you were going to end up with old floors, polished floors, and that's just not what the client was after. They're after a fantastic product and by the time they spent that much money on it, they could have built a new house. So we're like, let's do a new one. This design pretty much exactly the same from a floor plan layout because they'd achieved the layout in the design. We just converted that to new floor systems, new block work, you know, knocked out and walked away. So we recycled some of whatever we could, which I'm pretty keen to start looking more into. It's always been something Dad's pushed me for, like when we're in a throwaway society. So I don't want to throw more stuff away, but it's hard. People want to be spend the right money on the right things and sometimes throwing it away, it's cheaper.

I mean, I just think about the psychological process I went through as you were talking about what you do with a client in terms of the questions you ask. And immediately it was building for me, it was building more trust for you as a builder. I was like, because you're asking these questions, you're actually genuinely caring and interested about me getting the best outcome, not just like, you know, getting the job, like knowing where the sun comes up or knowing all these little bits and pieces, like Sure, I thought I wanted this, but I didn't think about these 15 implications that you've just brought up. And just by you asking those questions has made me trust you more as a builder. If I see that through your content already, then by the time I get to a discovery meeting, I'm already, you know, way ahead.

Yeah, exactly. Right? Yeah. People don't think about it, but they don't really know what they want. They see all these videos and photos of a finished product and go, I want this fancy bathroom. Don't realize it's four times the size you really need. Right. Like you don't need these huge bathrooms, massive kitchens. It comes down to better layouts and design and like you said, asking the right questions. It really comes down to that A. Because yeah, too many people just build stuff for the sake of it. And designers, man, what are they? What's the stats about architects and designs that get designed and never built because it's just uncost effective, it's out of the realm. And they get given a design that go and then they take it to a builder and the builder, because they're quoting for free or they've been given a tender, they just throw a dollar data to Dartboard almost and put extra on it because at the end of the day they Hope to win one in five, which means every five jobs has 20% more on it because they only win one in five. It's crazy. It really is. Society's changing and I think it's great Building industry, maybe not.

You probably don't underestimate it, but many builders underestimate the knowledge they have. They're having hundreds of these conversations. They're building, you know, dozens of homes or you know, remodeling dozens of of homes where they can see the perspective of all these things. Their customer. It's probably the second time in your instance that they've done anything so they don't have all that experience and so leaning on you for that expertise.

Correct. Like you think about, like I said before, that ideal client has probably built before. But I'd love to be able to say that our ideal client is someone that hasn't built before because they're looking for the right builder. But naturally, unfortunately, it's not really the case. Generally they've built before and had a average or poor experience and they, they go, okay, now I know what I know. I can choose a better builder or better thing. Like, you know, if someone goes and buys a car and they have a experience with a car, they know what that was wrong with that car. So they're going to look for something like a Toyota that might have had reliability but guess what, it unfortunately it costs more light because they work right. So people are now getting more information. It's the most readily available it ever has been. So being out there and showing the quality and the experience, that's what it's all about for me. It's showing them why we do a better job. Like it just proves that we must be doing something right. Because I've had two calls in the last fortnight from clients of our lawyer that have he's passed on our details and gone hey, these are some builders that might be able to help you finish projects that these poor builders have just destroyed the relationship building. They might be building perfectly fine but they've just destroyed the relationship. They're not transparent, they're hiding money asking for claims that are too much like they're over asking for the next claim when it's not due yet. So we're about to have some meetings with people about that and it's sad, it really is. And we're just finishing up another project that are builder in 2018 that they fought with the QBCC. The builder went broke like two years ago. The QVCC had the payout and everything but the house was built like crap. Like the builder forged engineering documents and sign them off to say the engineer came out and inspected when they didn't and now the house had sunk 18 millimeters in one corner on the side of a hill. That's scary. That's terrifying. And then yes, we had to go in, hold the house up, re underpin it, re prop it, pull the posts out, put new ones in. And then because we were able to do that, they've also given us another sixty thousand dollar work to build in underneath the house now and put a slab in and frame it because we've done the right thing and spent a long time educating them with what's going on. So yeah, it's amazing. It really is.

Well, that's the problem a lot of builders face or good builders face is that there's just that skepticism out there because people have had those experiences before.

It is. And unfortunately that skepticism makes it harder for people that are doing the right thing, that are working with coaches, working with mentors and working with organizations and stuff like hia, apb, tp. Everyone you can think of is they're upskilling, they're learning more. Good businesses are run by making money. Unfortunately making money means you can spend money on the right things, you can train people, you can, you know, all these things just keep adding up to you make money, you reinvest it back in the team, you reinvest it back in assets that grow, you know, everyone's skill set. So that at the end of the day, the experience is better and better and better every time.

Love that. So, I mean, big takeaways for me so far is like, you've got a really clear understanding of who you want to work with and that's fed into like, you're the build of the website and the marketing. And then you've been very deliberate about what role you want to play in your company. So you've created systems for other people to be able to deliver on parts that you know that are going to be time sucks for you when you want to take holidays or when you want to actually work on other parts. The strategic part of the business. I love that. But talk to me about what struggles you've had over your time in business and how you overcame them. What would you say, like, the biggest.

Ones, Breaking the belief of what you can and can't do, what you can charge, what you can't charge. Like, you know, we were coming out when we, dad and I started out, he's coming from a business that did volume homes. They were working off 3 to 4% net profit, which is astonishing. I don't know how they ever did that. And then when we came to renovations, we're doing 8 to 10% markups. And I'm thinking this doesn't sound right. Like we're not able to pay ourselves wages higher than some of the chippies that have been earning like that I've worked for before. I was earning more money as a apprentice almost. So to Denal, in the realm of 40, 50% plus markups, because we're running a better business, like, we're turning over $600,000 less the last financial year than we did the year before, making more profit. But that allows us to do better jobs, better quality and train our staff better and at the end of the day, pay myself more than I was on a chippy. Which is only fair, I think, for the risk that builders take.

Yeah, taking all the risk. Yeah, yeah.

The risk that we take as builders in the last couple of years, I've realized is ridiculous. And I feel bad for some of the volume homes and the way that the systems are running Queensland, I don't really know enough about other states, but, like, the risk that we take is incredible because we have to take the risk of every sub trade that works for us, right? Because at the end of the day QBCC basically says that for us to blame or put the push, the consequence and the blame to a subcontractor that we've got to agree that we didn't supervise correctly yet. I'm not electrician, I'm not qualified in electrical work or plumbing work and I haven't got a plumbing electrical license but apparently I need to know how to do plumbing electrical to tell them if they're doing it wrong, which is such a flaw in the system. It just amazes me. So I'm trying to work, I'm trying to get involved with the HIA so I can get on some committees and try and push for that. I'm really keen to try and help apprentices a little bit more like in the last four to six months I'm really keen to try and get involved in. We're working with the industry school in Ipswich. We've had a couple of work experience kids in the last two weeks. One's with us this today. For the rest of the next two weeks while they're on their five week block and last block we had a first female ever work for us. She's going to be signed up in her next block for a skill based apprenticeship for the rest of this year and then she's going to be full time with us after that. So I'm super stoked. She's basically in a sense, people say she's one of the boys but that's going to change because it's just going to be one of the team now and she gets along great, she works hard, she's showing the boys how to do timesheets and do better detail on the app than half their boys are doing. So that's awesome and hopefully that would work really well because Tony's a bit older, he's a couple of years older than me and he's not as familiar with working on a tablet or working with WonderBuilder whatever. So she's going to be able to understand that, help Tony a little bit with it or find things where they are and encourage him and then vice versa. Tony's going to be able to teach her about the carpentry and the skills and the stuff that she's going to need. So I'm really excited to see that dynamic evolve over the next few years. We're the first female in our business. So from a construction point I should say because Taylor's obviously in the business from the office so yeah, she's stoked as well. So Taylor, Taylor's pretty stoked and Viv's pretty stoked to be part of the scene.

You said first female. Taylor's in there.

Taylor's in the office. Yeah. Viv's on site. So I've had, I think I've probably only seen two females on our sites in the last few years. One was a roof facing gutter. Her father, daughter, and I think one of the Tylers had their wife or partner or something part of it, but that's pretty much it. So I'm super keen to see more in the industry. I think getting to skirting in front of schools, talking to like year 10s, 11s about what's better. Because the first thing they said to me was, oh, I want to be electrician. I said, why is that? They make more money. I was like, well, how about you go find out how much a builder makes eventually, when they're doing the right things and the right people and taking the right risk because the builder's above the electrician. So if you want to go, if you're going for money, then that's a potential option. Every trade can make money. You've just got to run the right business or work for the right people in the right areas and they will pay you what you're worth. Trying to encourage kids, that, that's not like. And that trades aren't the fallback. Like I had that at school, I went through school, didn't even do woodwork in any of my grade high school years because I wasn't too interested in it. And then walk out of school and go, let's do a carpentry apprenticeship, whatever, let's do it right. And then turns out that my whole personality, the reason I didn't like school and didn't gel well with school was because my whole problem, I'm a problem solver, that personality type that is a business owner. I'm an entrepreneur, business owner, personality type through and through. And I like solving problems, which is a slight downfall because sometimes you get to the stage where the business runs without you, that you create your own problems. And I'm waiting for that one day. I probably am already. But I think that's what that'll happen to most people. They'll create their own problems eventually when the business runs that well. Right. So terrible thing to have. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, as the business grows, you get different problems. So.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, right. Like, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like right now the problem I can see going forward, we've done really well with marketing and advertising and building our systems and process from our premium out on front of sales, that I want to have better systems and checklists and supervisor checklist. Which is why Tony and I, most foreman are working really close together. I want to push him into the supervisor role that he's at a qualification for for years and work one on one with him. So instead of working with Scritch 80% of the time now Scritch is able to work pretty much by himself and come back to me. I want to do the same thing with Tony. He's going to be one on one with me as much as possible, follow me around or I follow him back and forth and talk about the supervisor role, not just being the carpenter. So super keen to have a look at that and get him running semi by himself.

One of the problems which you might be running into at this point or at some point is trying to be the problem solver. If you're always the problem solver, then what happens when you leave?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Like what? That's. That's it, right? It's been. It was a pretty hard battle for Data and myself actually, like, and I think I inherited this bit more from him is he loves being the person everyone comes to to solve the problem. That's his natural. He wants to be the problem solver, right? So when someone calls him, he goes, oh, yeah, do this, this and this. So naturally I did that for years. Whereas, hang on, you've got to go, I don't know, man, I have no idea what you're talking about. What would you do? And that was one of the biggest things. I don't know, I can't remember which book I got this from. But it's basically like you just ask a question back to them. I don't know, man, what would you do? And then get them to bring back a couple answers to you. And then they might go, I don't know which one of those. Neither do I. No idea. Like, just act, almost act dumb, like, no idea what you're talking about, like. And then, yeah, I said, or miss phone calls on purpose if you know the foreman's calling you or something. I don't answer it sometimes. And then I get a message, tell me, oh, it's all good, sorted. I'm like, so it's funny, it literally happened this morning. Tony calls me at 7, I'm on another phone call. By the time that phone call's ended up, I've got a message saying, don't worry, all Good. Sorted it. I'm like, see, you didn't need to call me, did you? So it's good. Like getting better paperwork and stuff and details in our prelim is just. Is flowing on and now we just got to run our jobs better. So we're looking like we could go from 1.5 to double that in the next 12 months pretty comfortably. We were doing 2, 2 revenue ish before that. And then we've also got a painter and plasterer in house now so we can do some of those smaller jobs ourself. And I want to grow the painting a little bit and the plastering so that we can keep a little bit more in house and have a bit more quality control. Not necessarily control, but a bit more quality control over things and provide a better product, I think.

So you mentioned WonderBuild before. So that's the software you're using to manage projects. I. I imagine. Talk to me about what software you're using in your company because builders are often interested to find out that stuff.

Yeah, we did back in October. No, before that actually June, July last year. We were using Build a Trend. Fantastic platform overall, but not based for the Australian market, in my opinion. They obviously have too big of a market in the States to have as much impact for us Australians. And I was starting to look out. I wasn't really looking, but I. We went to an APB summit last year and I have to be sitting down and the guy was wearing a wonderbuild shirt. Hushi and I started having a chat with him at one of the intervals and he's like, oh, have a look at this. And I was just, okay, what do you do? It's project manager software. I was like, cool. And then next time I hear the same thing from one of the other builders I was talking to. They just moved from BuildXact to. To WonderBuild and they were going so much cheaper or this or. And it offers this. It's got estimating in house and I wasn't really even looking. And then there's so many little things. I'm like, oh great, let's just catch up with Hashi. So I organized a meeting with him, went through the platform and yeah, basically blown away with what they were doing, how they were doing it and how quickly they were implementing stuff. And then the feedback that every person I spoke to went, oh yeah, try these guys. This is why they get back to you straight away. They help answer questions. One of the downfalls that a lot of project management software I saw had because once I had a look at one to build, I went, oh, let's go have a look at a few. I'm just going to dive into one. Let's have a look at a few and see, look. One of the problems was a lot of onboarding for these platforms is really tricky because every builder runs a different business. I knew that I could figure out the program because I'm quite IT based. I'll go and problem solve or test things. I'll just click on this button. What the hell does it do? That's what it does. Next one, right? So I'd pull stuff apart when I was a kid so I knew that I could go in and just smash test the program and go, this works. This doesn't work this way, like how to do things. But I didn't have someone going, this is a running business and this is how, this is all the templates we have, this is how we do scheduling this. So for me, I've never had anyone else do that. I've never worked for anyone else. I've only ever worked for dad, myself and as a chippy as other businesses. But. So yeah, like you now have leads come in through our CRM that's about to get a bit of an overhaul with recording and all that. We use go high level and then once the lead has done the discovery call and the qualifying call and a discovery meeting, they. We put them into one into one to build as a lead and we generate a proposal for them for a prelim one. We've now got a template for that. So we basically, boom, check the pricing on the few pieces, get back to them, send it out to them, get them, accept it, convert it to a job for a prelim, run the job through the system. That way we've got checklists on each stage for each of the tasks. Then we go back to a prelim 2 once they're happy with their concept, boom, boom, boom. So the whole whole process is now, now we're just, we're now working on the construction checklists, narrowing them right down. We've got an overview one like a big picture one which is about 50% of the way. And then boom, we'll go back through same lists, refine that, then we'll refine again. So yeah, my biggest moving point at the moment for the business is getting that construction running as smoothly as the rest of the processes are now. And then you look at everything, right, you look at your numbers, you look at your statistics of leads coming in. Did they convert? And then you Go back and once we got every system a bulk of the way and they're all up to the same level, we then figure out which one's failing first or which one's not moving as fast as it should be moving. So we've now got a lot of leads, a lot of prelims coming through and I can see that growth of the, the revenue is going to go up from our construction sites. We need to now make sure we can back that up with all the systems and processes to run the business. So yeah, pretty, pretty keen. And yeah, wonderbuild's huge part of it. I catch up with Hashi probably once a month maybe on average. Go, this works. This doesn't work. This is the new idea. How does this work? How's that do? How do other builders run this type scenario? Being able to chat with like the products? I think it's product manager or something, his title. But yeah, basically he's just lead sales prop and chats with everyone he works with. Webinars and stuff like that, comes flies in, flies out and basically helps you just understand the program, what people need, what they don't need. It's just really well, it just flows so much better. For an Australian based gst, we've got wages, gets pushed to zero. It's just about to have the KPI integration with leads. So yeah, they're moving in a rate or not, that's for sure.

Awesome. Well Wonderbuild, they are a rewards partner for APB members out there that want to go check them out. They can get a cash rebate. If you're not then just, yeah, go check them out anyway because it sounds like they're doing a good job for you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've, yeah, we've got that. We've been using envisioned estimating to do some builder quantities models. So they do a concept model and a construction builder quantities model. So what that's allowing us to do is literally look at all the products and it allows me to dive into it from a pre construction point. So the part that I get involved in in the pre construction preliminaries is looking at those models because those models are basically replicas of exactly how it should be built. So I get to look at the model and go, okay, this model has studs here, nogs here, cladding here, frames here, insulation here. None of that doesn't work or this won't work later on. So that the team gets the plans, the specs, the engineering, the model and the model is built with the footings the depths, the heights, the steel locations, everything in it that punches out a bill of quantities. And now it's turning our jobs from being one offs where I've got to measure everything or someone has to measure every piece of block work and then figure out the equation for blocks or concrete or steel or whatever or timber to it spits out that timber because it's drawn a stud and it's drawn a noggin. I can go through and go purchase, order. I'd like to order all the materials for that stage in this stage or put a price to it. So my quoting's getting better. We're visualizing the buildings better. The clients get a 3D representation where we can take levels off and walk inside the buildings and have a look at them and how this is going to mesh. Yeah, it's crazy how technology is moving things like that. It's unreal. I can't wait to keep that going.

I'm just looking at WonderBuild's rewards listing and Vision to Estimating as well. And you haven't left a review, Regan, so I'm going to have to follow.

I have done a vision estimating video review and they haven't put it up yet. So I think that's one step. I'll have to put it on the rewards thing. But yeah, I've done the. I've done a nice little video with Emma from Vision Estimating bit of review for them. So I'll have to do one for Hashi, the man himself and get it. Get them a review as well.

Podcast anyway.

Yeah, yeah, they can just cut it out of this one. That's easy enough, right? So cool.

All right, well, let's put a bow on this interview. What's one piece of advice you'd give to other builders who are looking to improve their company?

I think I was thinking about this before. I think it's one step at a time and that comes down to talking to other builders and other people and learning more. Because once you open that can of worms of just one question to this person or how do you do that? How do you do this? What if. What's your situation? Or just. And like. Like as a tx, the conversation starts just talking to people and asking the question, commenting on a post of another builder. Oh, how do you do that? Looks fantastic or whatever. Supporting other people, it one step at a time really. And I guess one of the sayings I was taught I was given a book by a friend of ours was Zig Ziglar and it was help People get help. People get what they want to get, and you will get what you want to get, and it sticks by me a lot. So, yeah, help people get the home they want and I'll get the business from them and the money that I need and the lifestyle that I need to run my family and, and buy the things I want to buy on the weekends and holidays I want to do. So, yeah, it's. It's a pretty powerful one, that one.

Yeah. Nice. I like that quote. Regan, thanks so much for coming on Professional Builder Secrets today. I've had a lovely chat with you and you've shared so much valuable information, which I think's testament to that quote as well. Actually, you're helping other builders out there. That might be a different part of their journey to you. So you can really tell that you're just being open about learning and, you know, leaning into, you know, asking questions, which is awesome.

And that's it. We bumped into each other at the summit this year and I was in the the on the VIP seat and I said to Will, I was like, man, when we catching up, I said, let's just do this. And you're like, what, you want to chat? And I'm like, yeah, let's do it. Like, what else are we going to do? Let's have a chat. Let's talk to other builders. I listen to so many podcasts and stuff, and I think it's, you know, time I have a chat and give back what I've learned in the last few years now from every podcast. And, you know, I've listened to every one of the APB ones, so pretty keen on the hormozy one at the moment. Alex is. It's pretty inspiring.

Well, yeah, thanks for coming on, Regan. I really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing so much good advice.

Appreciate it, man. Have a good one, eh?

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