217. The Systems Behind Success With Andy Skarda

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder Secrets. In this episode, I interview our head coach here at apb, Andy Scarter. Every month, Andy shares a series of wins from some of our best performing business coaching clients. I went ahead and analyzed all the wins from 2025 and cherry picked five trends that illustrate what is separating the high achieving builders from the rest. If you've ever wondered what actually moves the needle for growing residential builders, this episode will show you exactly where the breakthroughs are happening. 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@apparatus team.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

All of the knowledge that you have in your head is useless if it doesn't get converted into action. Most builders believe that the way they're going to grow is by working more. They can often end up building less homes and make more money purely because they've pushed the margin up. I genuinely feel pain and sorrow sometimes when I look at how hard many, many builders work for very little return. Your business can only scale to the level of your capacity. Instead of every single time they go into a sales conversation, they've got to reinvent the wheel. What they're starting to do is to find the sequence and the process that works best every time. If you aren't attracting the kind of people that appreciate and understand the value that you add to the process, you're not going to be able to achieve those higher margins.

Welcome to Professional Builders 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 Andy Scarta, our head coach here at apb. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Will. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

For a bit of context, what we're going to talk about today is big takeaways from our builder wins throughout the year. Now our builder wins. Every month we have a team meeting. We get together the whole team at APB across all of our geographies and your section for that meeting is to give some updates from all the coaches and the wins they are having with their building company clients. And so what I've done is I've taken all of those wins from the whole year and done an analysis to find the five most consistent trends across all of those wins. And that's where we are here today.

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's one of our core values. We talk about celebrating the wins for people that don't know, people that are in our business coaching cohort and our elite mentoring cohort. We have a group mastermind session once a month and I share those wins again with everybody so that there's some peer review, peer accountability, and most importantly, some degree of education, but mainly to encourage people that, you know, people are making progress. And. And it's easy when you're in the trenches and you're just dealing with all the brown, smelly stuff that comes at you in our industry to lose sight of those wins, you know, so it's. I'm glad you've chosen to do this. I think it's a great thing just even on the podcast to kind of pause for a bit and look at what are those wins and how did they happen. So well done, Will.

I think the wins themselves are nice and it gives recognition to the builders who will need to keep anonymous today just for the. Because they're behind the scenes wins. But what's the takeaway for anyone listening today that isn't involved in this process? What can they learn from these wins?

A couple of things. One, we do not have a single builder anywhere in the world in coaching or elite mentoring who is a superhero. There are some people that are special and there's some people that are really committed. And the fundamental thing that I'd like people to hear today is one implementation above all else. All of the knowledge that you have in your head is useless if it doesn't get converted into action and actually get out into the universe and do something for you. So that's number one. And number two is, although we're not going to talk about individual people, every one of the win stories that you found came from somebody who's exactly like somebody who's listening to this podcast. And the only difference potentially would be that one, they got themselves into a coaching or mentoring program where they could be guided and learn the stuff they needed to learn, which shows a level of humility. To start with, I don't know everything, I need help. And then secondly, as I say, the most important thing, they did it. They actually implemented what their coach shared with them, what the action plans taught them, and the results they've got is because they did it.

Humility in action.

Yeah, the two criteria, maybe we can invent a word, humaction. Hum, action or actuality? We could come up with something there that would stick my needs to workshop that one. Okay.

All right, well let's dive into the meat then.

Andy.

The first trend that came out is summarized as builders transform once they implement pricing for profit and fix their margins. Talk to me about what that means to you and whether or not that's representative across the group of coaching clients that we see.

Look, it is probably the fundamental situation, if you look at profitability in particular, I always refer to it as the fuel for growth or the fuel for scaling because at the end of the day you cannot fund growth and scalability if you have no money. And really what we're saying with margins is across the board pretty much universally, 95, maybe 96% of people that come to the APB and pretty much those that come into coaching are not making enough money out of the work that they're doing. And you know, if you look at our mission statement, our mission statement is to improve the global construction industry for builders and their clients. And, and the reason we have that as our mission is that we've seen that builders generally don't get paid enough for what they do. Equally, clients don't get the best experience that they could have. But those two are interlinked. On the negative side, if you are not making enough money, you cannot provide a world class service. And secondly, from the client side, if all you doing is looking for the cheapest price all the time and beating the builder down well, then you can't expect a great level of service yourself because you're not prepared to pay for it. So margin is critically important. And I mean there's all of the controversy and the confusion in a lot of builders minds about the difference between markup and margin in that even some of them that are trying to achieve the margin that they should be end up achieving significantly less than that. And the bottom line is you cannot grow out of a place of lack. You have to have the money to be able to reinvest into your business and only once you do that will you actually start to see things improve. I'm not 100% certain what the other wins we're going to talk about are, but they really, most of them require a level of investment of both time and money. You don't have enough margin coming in, you don't have the money to be able to reinvest into your business in order to grow or scale. In terms of where that comes from, there's really four fundamental pieces. We obviously want our builders to have a strategic plan. And built into that strategic plan would be that they start to apply our pricing for profit protocol where which essentially means that they're not just marking up a contract for the contract to make a profit, they're actually marking it up in a way that includes some of the fixed expense overheads of the business so that the business as a whole makes a profit rather than just that particular job. Once they've made the profit, they've got to track it correctly. And that's where wipa, the work in progress accounting adjustment comes into play. Because now they're getting the data that's actually showing them whether or not their business is profitable. And if they bring those two things together, get their construction slots laid out and know what the year looks like, all of a sudden there's some scarcity and urgency in their selling process. All of a sudden they start to get those better contracts at better margins. The other thing on this, which is really interesting is that most builders believe that the way they're going to grow is by working more. And in fact what we find often is that once builders understand how powerful margin is, they can often end up building less homes and make more money purely because they've pushed the margin up. Now I'm just thinking about, you talk about the win stories. We've got a particular client who was very nervous about pushing up the price of what he was offering people because he was in a highly competitive market. Now part of what we did there, which is maybe outside the ambit of this part of the discussion, was we made sure he was talking to the right people first. But once he got that right, what he found was because he was talking to the right people, they were prepared to pay that little bit extra to get more. And all of a sudden what he found was he didn't have to be fearful about pushing up his price to a decent margin if he was talking to the right people. Now this particular builder happened to be building very high end homes, which of course is where one of the other mistakes that builders make is when they are building bigger value contracts, for some reason they think they need to shave their margins. They there's a bit of guilt in there. There's a bit of concern about, well, that's a lot of money. What they forget often though is those bigger contracts are more complex, they take longer and therefore you need that additional margin to counter those things and then to make sure that you actually make some money. But this particular client, simply by going to a higher margin on the contract as A whole the window package in that particular job that I'm thinking of, which, if my memory is correctly, was somewhere in the region of 3 million DOL for the windows on this home. That alone netted him almost half a million dollars in gross profit. So once this engine starts to work for you, it's incredible. And of course, what did that do? All of a sudden he now had the ability to go out and employ some people and scale the business because now he had the fuel that, that he could actually put back into the business.

We're just tracking down where that client is based. They want to Clint's clients, aren't they? Clint Best. They're in the US somewhere.

North America.

North America. That's sounds easy. Well, I mean, in theory. Okay, just mark up your projects higher.

Right. I'll put the caveat on it. You've got to be talking to the right person. So, you know, we spoke earlier about the fact that you've got people that go out there and they deliberately take a plan to five builders to try and get the cheapest price possible. Okay. Now they run into two types of problem. Problem number one, often builders don't know their numbers well enough to actually estimate the job properly. In which case sometimes the guy that gives you the lowest number actually doesn't know what he's doing. And what the client then ends up with is 50% of the way through the job. This guy realizes that, oops, I made a mistake. Or in the worst case scenario, sadly, we've heard of some examples where people have deliberately put in a low bid to get the job, and then when the client is committed, have gone back and forced them into paying significantly more money in doing it properly. It starts with your marketing. We always talk about the fact that marketing affects margin. If you aren't attracting the kind of people that appreciate and understand the value that you add to the process, you're not going to be able to achieve those higher margins because people aren't going to understand why it is actually valuable. So it's critically important that people understand those two things go hand in hand.

Hold on to that thought because trend number four is marketing.

Perfect.

There you go, Utah. That builder was from.

Okay, right. Well, there we go.

Trend number two, hiring, delegation and removing bottlenecks unlocks massive growth. Talk to me about your thoughts on that.

I genuinely feel pain and sorrow sometimes when I look at how hard many, many builders work for very little return. And I mean, I've said it often on this podcast, very few builders get into this industry to Run a business. Most builders get into building because they love building. They want to create beautiful homes. But of course, as that grows, there comes that day where they look around and they say, oops, I now have a team of X number of people. I've got to understand all of these other pieces of the business. Now, the problem is often they have done everything themselves. Up to that point, they probably weren't marketing, they were relying on word of mouth referrals or whatever the client comes in. They do all the sales process, whatever that looks like. They eventually sign a contract, they do all the estimating, and then they run the job. Probably in a lot of cases, pulling on a tool belt for a couple of hours a day at least, and then working on the job and then going home and after dinner, you know, a couple of hurried minutes with your kids, back into the office to then get the admin work done. It's scary. They talk about the fact that a bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle. And what happens is people actually, as they grow the business, because they're not comfortable or trained in leadership, they battle with things like delegation. And the net result of that is they often will hire the wrong people. That's where the first problem comes in. The second piece is even if they've hired the right people, they probably don't train them to and onboard them the way that they should. And the net result of that is that on the occasions where they might even try to delegate, it ends up with a very bad outcome and they end up reverting back to. It's quicker and easier just to do it myself. But what they've got to understand is they get into the syndrome around one of my favorite numbers, which is 168. There are only 168 hours in a week. Everybody gets the same. Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin, the two of us, everybody listening. So if you think about it, what you've got to work out as a professional builder is how do I best utilize that 168 hours to achieve my end result. And of course, if you are doing everything yourself, your business can only scale to the level of your capacity. So one of two things happens. Either growth is very stunted or the builder ends up sadly. I know I joke a lot. This time I'm not killing himself or going very close to it in trying to grow this business. But because he doesn't build that team around him, he ends up carrying the load himself. And sadly, that is never, ever going to work as a recipe for somebody to actually be able to scale. So I mean, the way you've identified that win is, is absolutely perfect. It starts with hiring. You got to hire correctly, then you've got to be comfortable with delegation and delegation speaks to systemization and training and onboarding. And then those two together will actually remove the bottleneck which in most cases is the builder. And then that's where the growth will actually start to come from.

In the story that we've pulled out here, which is just one example of the wins which got gave us this trend. This builder was based in New Zealand, one of Carmel's clients. What's standing out to me is it says he was terrified of leaving for a long planned trip. That was kind of his point of reference, which I think would resonate with a lot of people listening today.

I mean, I was talking to a client this week who said to me, they went on holiday three months ago but they weren't present. Yeah, they were physically there, but they were constantly on their phone and their laptop dealing with problems in the office. As they said they probably shouldn't have gone because all they ended up doing was spending a whole lot of money to be somewhere that would have been really nice if they could have been there, but they weren't. This one, in terms of the toll it takes on builders, physically, emotionally, spiritually is huge. And then into the bargain, if it's not done properly, they can't grow. And I mean, that builder, if I remember correctly, not only was he able to go away on that trip, but it was actually an extended trip. It was like a seven week or something trip overseas where, you know, he kind of had to make sure that everything was set up correctly because he'd done that. He had an amazing seven week overseas trip. Not only a good holiday, but he came back to a business that had achieved everything that he wanted it to.

Is it fair to say that the symptoms around burnout and feeling the pressure of not being able to take a holiday is one of the most consistent stresses that builders come to the conclusion.

Of, without a doubt. I don't know whether you know this because we kind of compartmentalize it, but I, I run a strategic retreat every year. Kayla is tasked with buying the swag and so on that we give people at the retreat and I asked her to source a bunch of these for me. Now this is a needle and it has printed on it. I'm not sure if the camera will pick it up, but it says move the needle. I don't know if you can actually see that.

Yeah, I can Just those, those on audio can't. But.

Well, it's a knitting needle. But the, the idea was to literally give everybody a piece of it, to give them a physical representation of as the owner of the business. If you are not busy doing things that actively move the needle, you need to delegate, you need to bring people on. I think there's a saying that says you need to only do what only you can do. That's really the reality now, the danger. And we go back to the earlier discussion again. It's great in theory, but if you don't have the margin and the pipeline to be able to support the recruitment cost and the onboarding and then paying somebody puts you in a very difficult place, which is why I love the way you've structured the wins that you've picked out. Margin is where it starts. If we don't have the fuel in order to be able to do what we need to do, the rest of it becomes very, very difficult.

We have to ask yourself a hard question at some point. If you're working 60, 70 hours a week and not paying yourself more than what you could earn somewhere else and you're stressed and you're not going on holidays, what's. What's the point?

Exactly. I mean, virtually every one of our programs, one of the first things we get builders to do is to calculate the hourly rate that they are earning. And I seriously, in doing this for 10 years, nearly I can count on half of one hand how many builders have seen that number and been happy about it. Most of them realize they are the lowest paid hourly worker in their business. As you say, why, why do that? It makes no sense. However, when we point out to them that at this point in their lives, they're earning $20 an hour. And we tell them that the guys that are doing this properly are earning north of $250 an hour, that starts to become worthwhile. And the interesting thing is, how do they get to that? Two ways. They push up the money they take home and they drop the number of hours that they work. And all of a sudden the professional guys are working 40 to 45 hours a week. If that's. And taking home a salary that makes it worthwhile, then it's worth doing well.

The recent data that came out of the State of Residential Construction Industry report actually reinforced that exact thing. The builders working 40 hours or less a week, we're earning more than the builders working 60 hours a week.

But it's working smart in those 40 hours. That's the difference.

All right, trend number three. And now that we're getting through these, the order isn't perfect, but we can make it work, so we'll go for it. Structured sales processes create predictability and high value contracts. So we obviously had quite a few wins come out of how builders have implemented a more strict sales process. And that's had some great benefits on the contracts they were signing.

Yeah, I don't know whether we're going to talk about systems or not, but this is kind of a subset of systems. There's no question that systems that are properly designed and then properly executed make you more efficient. And if you look at it in the sales space, the problem is if you don't have a sales process, you have no way of working out where the client is in the journey towards signing that contract. And Therefore you're never 100% sure what has to happen next to get them there. So we actually, out of all of the systems that we get people to build, the sales system is generally the first one because it's the one that they can implement straight away as long as they've got leads that they're working with. The picture here would be that instead of every single time they go into a sales conversation, they've got to reinvent the wheel. What they're starting to do is to find the sequence and the process that works best every time. And then what we're looking to do is to capture that, document it, go as far as scripting it. Now that's often a word where builders start to get worried. It's a script, I'm gonna have to read a script. No, what we're really saying is get it to the point that whether it's bullet points or whatever, you can make sure that everything you need to cover gets covered at the right point in the process. We don't skip steps, we don't drop them. We do what we know works. And if they can literally repeat the process, two things happen. They will repeat the successes. But more importantly, to go back to our earlier win, they put themselves in a place where it's much easier to employ a salesperson to now come in and run that process if it's been proven and documented. And obviously it's easy for them to train the person and delegate it because they've been the ones that developed it and they have the confidence that knowing that it actually works. So that's kind of the, the overview of that. Probably the, the most compelling story was one of Jacob's clients, Western Australia, literally had no sales process. Jacob worked with Them to give them not only a sales process, but very customized. And we closely follow the, the ethos of a guy named Jeb Blunt who takes the sales process and instead of making it this big elephant that you have to eat, he brings it down into those bite sized chunks where what you're really trying to do is to get people making micro commitments that they're making small incremental yeses, yeses, yeses, until when you get to the end, instead of it being this huge thing now where they're going to have to make a decision, they've made all the decisions along the way. All that we're doing in the final proposal is actually confirming everything that they've already designed. So this particular client did that incredibly well and literally had, you could call it pretty much immediate success. I think in their, in their first run out of the new process, they secured a 1.5, $1.6 million contract literally after one meeting, which put them in the place where literally everything else could happen via the emails that they had designed or the phone calls that they designed, which were scripted. Theirs is probably the most extreme story, but there are versions of that in every one of our builders that has got the APB sales blueprint implemented. You're going to hear pretty much the same story out of all of them. And I will say to you that for a lot of builders, particularly the guys that have been intrinsically involved in the sales in their business, it's a hard one for them to let go of because it's so critically important. But again, it comes back to having the leadership fortitude to be able to put the system together, develop it so that you know that it works and then that gives you the confidence to train and delegate and then obviously it can go from there.

Well, even if you are doing the sales calls yourself, if that's something that you are still owning as, as the building company owner, there's going to be great benefits from documenting a process like.

This, of course, and it's very easy if you want to add administrative help. You know, in other words, you'll keep the client contact going, but you can bring somebody in to help you get the emails done and the, the administrative side of things very easily because the process is now completely laid out. And what most builders find is that in the early days, yes, it's a script and they probably have it somewhere that they can follow it quite closely. But like so many things, as you get into the habit and as you see it working, it starts to become second nature and eventually they don't even refer to that script. Because they're able, it becomes, as I say, second nature.

One thing you didn't touch on in great detail is the qualification process. And through all the data we collect in our surveys, but also through the builders that engage in our community, this concept of poor quality leads or leads wasting my time or wasting my time with taiki. Because this kind of idea comes through a lot where builders feel like they're not speaking to the right people. And this kind of solves that as well, doesn't it?

Oh, absolutely. And you know, that's kind of a. It's almost a two prong process. We said earlier you need to be talking to the right people. That's number one. But you know, most of the people we work are really nice human beings. And because they're nice human beings, even if they don't follow a formal qualification process, they'll give somebody 15 or 20 minutes of their time without feeling like that's a bad thing. But, you know, three people who each take 20 minutes of your time, that's one of those 168 hours gone. Now, I don't know if you've ever watched the program Tiger Kings, have you?

Yeah.

Okay. I believe the Tiger Kings is the most scientific method of wasting an hour of your life that has ever been invented. And I say categorically to all of my clients. If your choice is spend an hour talking to a client who's never going to build with you or watch an episode of Tiger Kings, go and watch an episode of Tiger Kings. At least you'll be vaguely entertained for that hour. But it, as you said, it is an absolute waste of time for both parties. That's the sad part. It's not just wasting the builder's time, it's also wasting the client's time. You know. So again, within that sales process that we talk about, we get builders to identify the non negotiable criteria. A client must be in my area, must be able to, must own the land, has built before, or not, depending. But to literally sit down and list, if they don't get seven ticks, I'm not going to speak to them any further. I'm not taking them any deeper. There's nothing worse than spending, as some builders do, months putting together a proposal and then find out that the person was never ever a prospect, actually. Anyway, that's soul destroying.

All right. Trend number four. You touched on this when we were talking about margins and how important marketing was in terms of getting lead flow and increasing your margins. So this trend, marketing consistency creates lead flow and pipeline stability. Talk to me about how important that is.

This feels very hypocritical for me to be talking to you about marketing. But anyway, you asked the question, so I'll answer the question this way. It is the most important discipline in a building company. And a lot of builders get uncomfortable when I say that because they naturally believe that construction is the most important discipline. The problem you've got here is that if you don't have people to build for, it doesn't matter how good a builder you are, that talent and ability is absolutely wasted. So bottom line is, if you want to run a successful building company, you have to have leads. If you don't have leads, you definitely won't get sales. No sales equals no revenue. No revenue equals no business. You might have a hobby, but you don't have a business. So the one of the other problems that comes up here always is I don't need to advertise. I rely on word of mouth referrals. Now, my colors to the mast right up front. Referrals are solid gold, the best leads you can get, but they're inconsistent. You have no way of controlling them. So what they do is they force you into a feast or famine cycle. One month of the year your phone rings off the hook and nine months of the year, crickets. Just nothing going on. So it's why we want builders to bring in a marketing system. We often call it a marketing engine that will deliver leads on command. Now that's not an easy thing to do. It's easy to say it's a time consuming and, and sometimes very frustrating process. But what we try to do is to say we're not saying don't have those referrals and word of mouth leads. Yes, we want them, but we want them to be the cream. We want to be able to scale the business. There's the key here. You cannot scale a business on referrals. You've got to have consistency in those leads. And it's not just do we have enough leads, it's do we have enough leads of the right quality so that they are qualified leads so that we can take them through our sales process. And once a builder gets to that point where he's got his messaging right, he's got the medium right, he knows where his people are. He literally gets to the place that by scaling his budget on his ad spend and his marketing, he can scale the return that he gets back. And because of that, he can those troughs and dips that come with referrals, he can at least fill those dips up to some extent and make that thing a lot more consistent. Add to the fact that his marketing is aimed at the right people. And now we go back to the first thing you mentioned, which was margin, because now what is he doing? He's got no guarantee with a referral that it will be somebody that will be prepared to pay for the value that he delivers. But if he is actually catching that fish himself using the bait that he's designed, etc. Etc. He's going to know that that person will appreciate what he's got to offer. So it's a win win on both sides of the discussion.

Yeah, I can see why builders are apprehensive with marketing because most of the ones I speak to and the data tells us that they've spent money on marketing at some point, expecting results and not got it or had. You know, their reality was different to their expectations and so they're burned by it. They don't. They feel like it's a waste of money.

Yeah. I have a client who's based in the United States in Rhode Island. He builds very high end historic coastal homes and caters to a very, very high end niche. He decided that he needed a marketing agency, set up a meeting with one of New York's top marketing agencies and said to me in his coaching session before the meeting, what should I be asking them? I said, you shouldn't be asking them anything. They should be asking you the following questions and where. I actually saw him this morning and I said to him, how did that meeting go? This is an absolute waste of my time. Full of smoke and mirrors. They had all kinds of things, but they did not ask me once about the fundamental things that they need to know in order to generate what I need. So you look, the, the problem is in that industry, sadly, there's a lot of vanity metrics that float around that people use. It's one of the reasons why we started the, the APB rewards program because, you know, there isn't a marketing agency on the face of this earth that will always be the right one. But certainly we work with a variety of them and a number of them are doing really well for our clients because they understand builders, they understand building, they understand that process, which is a safer way to go, obviously. But you know, it kind of really comes back to you. You've got to take it the next step. Getting the leads is a little bit like a dog chasing a car. Once he's caught it, what's he going to do with it? And it's the same thing here. You know, a builder needs to understand, in addition to just getting the leads, we need a CRM system. We need to make sure that there are follow ups that are predetermined that any lead that comes into the system gets. The lead magnet gets a follow up email, maybe gets a phone call, depending on who they are. And those things. Again, we're back to talking about systems that they, they need to happen consistently and if they do, what happens is nobody falls through the cracks. The win that I think stood out for you on this one was a New Zealand client who didn't have a problem actually with leads. He had a fair amount of leads but they were lying dormant. They were coming into the system and then just literally sitting there. He works with one of our North American coaches, Leah, and what Leah got him to do was to get the follow up system and his CRM actually working. And within a ridiculously short space of time when he started to actually treat those leads the way he should have, he had a pipeline with a potential revenue of $9 million in literally weeks. And the only thing that changed was that he actually started valuing and looking after those leads a lot better. So it's a, it's again, we're kind of going back to. It's been interesting. The ones you've picked are variations of the theme. The theme being every part of your business needs to be systemized.

Yeah, well, they're feeding in together. Together as you're talking about it. I mean, if we go back to the beginning, we had profit and margins. But in order to increase your prices, you need marketing in place. But in order take your leads and turn them into sales, you need a sales process in place. And the other one was delegation. So once you've got those systems in place, you can hand them over to someone else. So we're going to tie it all together with a nice one. It's not about systems, but it's about leadership. So the fifth trend that came out was a lot of the builders that had wins throughout the year. They were really clear around their vision, their organizational structure and their role as a leader in the business. And I know you've just produced a whole bunch of content on leadership, which is something we're leaning into a lot more next year. Talk to me about how this has played out throughout 2025.

It's a discipline that generally doesn't get the attention that it deserves. And it's critical if you are Going to run a successful professional building business and you're going to scale it and grow it to its full potential. You have to become a leader. You basically have to stop being a builder. You have to move into being a business owner. And when you've got that part of it running, then you need to become a leader. And basically what a leader is doing is managing and controlling the resources at his disposal, which every builder on the face of this earth gets the same three resources every day. Time, money, people. That's basically what every builder gets to work with. So what leadership is really doing is getting to a place of understanding how best to do that. And it comes down to a couple of fundamentals. One, you need to have a clear vision for your life. Why are you doing this? And it's strange. I remember being on the first strategic retreat we ever ran at Hamilton island and having a builder who had just grown his business in the previous two years from 3 million to 30 million a year. And he was sitting in the front row in front of me and I asked the question, why are you doing this? What's the long game? And he came to me at the coffee break and he said to me, I've been in business for 18 years, nobody's ever asked me that question. And I've never thought about it. I just get up and come to work every day and try and make money. And what we had to really get people comfortable with is money's a tool, money's a van. Okay? We can use that van to take really nice old people from the old age home down to the mall to go and do their shopping. Or we can take that same van and drive it through the front window of the jewelry store and steal all the jewelry that's on display. The van doesn't care. The van is a van and money is exactly the same. We have to have a picture of my life beyond this business I work with at the moment. A lot of them are moving through this process of not what do I do but who am I? Okay, starting to get a picture of if I was not building what would my life be? And realizing that, that sometimes you've got to be able to transcend what you do to and started look at who you want to be. That long term vision for you will be what determines your company mission. Because essentially the company is the vehicle that's going to get you to that point. So now, as soon as you got mission, what's now starts to happen is when you bring other people. We spoke about margin giving you the ability to invest in your business and it gives you the fuel to build that team. When that team comes into a situation where there is a clear mission, everything is focused on the same outcome. You know, I'm a rugby union nut. I know you love your cricket and your tennis. There's a clear mission in any game and that's to win. And. And everybody on that team or on that field is engaged in doing their part for a common outcome. That's all that mission and vision actually are. Then you get to your frustrations. You know, most builders, in fact, most people, if you say to them, what are your core values? They're not top of mind, they're not something that we walk around. Ah, that's one of my core values. They built into us both, I think, genetically to some degree, but not just nature. There's some nurture as well. If I'm playing tennis with you and your brother and there's a dicey line call, and I might be able to get away with saying to, you know, it was out, am I going to do that or am I going to say no? That was in your point. That's a value and that comes from a variety of things. What most builders will be able to identify with is if you drive home and you are regularly frustrated about things in your business, that is a sign that your core values are not being met. And if you go and dig down to the bottom of what is frustrating me, you'll actually find what the core value is. Equally the flip side of that coin, if you drive home some days going, I absolutely love what I do, dig into that one, you'll find core values that are being met. But if now you bring those two concepts together, we've got core values that are primarily there to help us decide how we make decisions. That's what your core values do. And we've got a mission that unifies our purpose. All of a sudden you've got a very, very efficient machine. Now, what you've got to do is bring the technical piece of the leadership, which is bring those people into an organizational structure that delivers the outcome you want. Make sure that that structure is detailed, make sure that every person's role is clear, make sure that their KPIs, their job description, their everything is easy for them to access so that they can execute easily. And if you do all of that, you start to see a completely different dimension actually open up. And again, I don't know whether you can quote saucy figures, but I'd be pretty certain that the Builders that have got the leadership side of their business sorted are making more money than the guys that haven't.

Yeah, there is a study in there about organizational charts and the builders with them versus without them, highly more profitable. So I won't quote the exact number because otherwise I'll be making it up.

The reality here is they're going to be people listening to us who are exhausted. I mean they, they literally doing everything themselves. And that may partly be because they've never, they've just accepted that this is life, this is what running a building business is all about. The good news, I guess out of this discussion is it doesn't need to be like that. There are people, as you just heard earlier, that went on seven week overseas trips. The problem is if you don't know what you're trying to get to, you're not able to bring the resources to bear. Carmel works with a client, funny enough, also Western Australia who was living that nightmare, exhausted, doing all the admin, running the jobs on site, no real vision, didn't understand his numbers, didn't have an organizational structure. But as soon as those things came into place, he could see that he needed to hire a project manager or a site manager and went through the process to do that properly, found the right guy, brought him into play. Funny enough, the outcome that he got almost immediately was he could actually take a holiday, which I think in this case was the first holiday he'd had in 10 years. And then just to add a little bit of spice to that, while he was away on holiday, they signed a 1.1 million dollar contract in his absence. Now, I mean there will be people listening to this who going, they're talking rubbish. That never happens. I promise you faithfully that is a genuine story and one of many that are a similar version of that same story.

Yeah, one thing that stood out, Andy, as you were just getting into your rhythm with leadership and talking about the why it's a really good time of year. And I guess there's any good time if you, if you take a moment to sit back, but particularly this time of year is a good time to reset and think about why you're doing what you're doing, right?

Oh, absolutely. And you know, it's, there's that saying that says if you like shade, when is the best time to plant an oak tree? And the answer is 20 years ago.

Yeah.

And the second best time is today. You're 100% right. We're in a season where it makes sense to do it. But if you don't have a clear picture of why you are doing what you're doing. Take an hour, go and think about that, answer that question, because that'll change your future.

Well, that seems like a good place to end it. Andy, we've covered some really big topics. I think my big takeaway is leadership is what ties it all together at the end of the day. But the rest is just ingrained in systems. Whether it comes to your pricing, whether it comes to your marketing, your sales. It comes down to having structures and systems in place so that it doesn't rely on you to do everything. What would your big takeaways be from all of this? And how can builders take it forward to the New Year?

Hard to give you one nugget, but I mean the you know me, I'm renowned for the solution is join the apb. But in amongst that joke is the fact that builders don't need to reinvent the wheel in this space. We have taken the time to work out exactly how to do all of these things and by becoming a member of the apb, people get immediate access to all of that instantaneously. So if you think about the range of things that we've covered, different people listening to this will be at different stages in that journey. It's hard to give you one thing that would encapsulate all of it other than probably leadership, because it's going to be those strategic decisions that will make the difference if nothing changes. Nothing changes if you keep doing everything the way you've always done it and expect to get a different outcome. I think Einstein said that is the definition of insanity right there. So I guess the nugget would be do something different if things aren't working out for you now the way you want them to make a change. And again, in the spirit of this time of the year and so on, I would be saying of course we'd love you to come to the apb, but if you can't for some reason find somebody that can help you walk through these processes that we've discussed and really get to a place where you get your life onto a trajectory that's taking you to that end result that you are looking for, become a leader. That's probably it.

I mean I the greatest place to start if you are look, thinking about the APB though, is the Builder's Profit Accelerator, which is our four week intensive, which literally goes through all of the critical systems we've spoken about today and gets you set up. I mean, if you started the New year with that four weeks. Yeah. You're on the right track.

Oh, without a doubt. That would. If nothing else, it would set you up for the best year you've ever had.

Yeah.

And then from there, you can build, obviously, to whatever you want.

Great. Well, Andy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. I've had a lot of fun, and there's been lots of nuggets in there, so I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. See you soon.

Thanks to our listeners as well, 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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