220. Preparing For 2026 With Russ Stephens

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder Secrets. In this episode, I interview APB's co founder, Russ Stevens. Leading into 2026, we did some deep analysis on the biggest challenges builders are facing when they come to us. The three core themes that came out talked about finding quality leads, dealing with low profit and low margins, and systemizing themselves out of the business so they don't feel stuck any longer. So I got Russ on this interview to go deep onto those three problems and talk about strategies, statistics, and things you can do in 2026 to start solving them. 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.

There's a lot of gaps in the level of planning that builders do. Just simply having a documented plan results in builders having a 2% higher markup. If they don't have enough quality leads, it's because of the actions that they've taken or failed to take over the previous 12 months. 1% of your revenue is not enough to feed that business. It's a vicious cycle that a lot of builders do get caught up in. The number one thing that you can do to generate quality leads is educate the marketplace, produce good content. Then you've got to amplify paid advertising. When you master that formula and generate more demand than you can supply, you will never have a margin problem.

Welcome to Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt, and today I'm joined by APB co founder Russ Stevens. Russ, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Will. Excited to be here.

Yeah, very excited to have you on today. I've been deep doing some qualitative analysis on the challenges that builders come to us with over the last several years. And there's three themes that have come out and I want to address all of them head on today as we move into 2026 so that builders can be prepared for that. So very excited to unpack that with you.

Yes, and it's interesting, isn't it? It doesn't matter where they are. Australia, the us, Canada, New Zealand. Builders all have the same challenges.

Well, let's talk about what those are so the three problems that I've identified that consistently come through are not having enough quality leads, having low profit or low margins, and not being ready to scale because they don't have systems in place. Is that what you've interpreted as well, Russ, over the last several years?

Yeah, I think you've got the big three there. These are at the heart of most challenges for builders. Absolutely, yeah.

And our most recent state of residential Construction industry report also revealed similar challenges from the data side of things. So it's all kind of lining up. But let's dive into why all of this is so important for builders moving into 2026 and why they need to start planning ahead to deal with these challenges. Talk to me about that.

Well, I mean, builders need to plan because it's best practice in business. It's what everyone tells us to do in business. We have to plan. And we hear things like a failure to plan is a plan to fail. So we know it's important. And I would say builders more than anyone know the importance of planning because when it comes to building, if they don't have a plan, they got a pretty good idea of what might happen if they started to construct a home without having a plan. But the trouble is they don't always translate the importance of having plans to build. They don't always translate that to other areas of the business. You know how important it is to have plans all throughout operations. Your job schedule, for instance, with timelines and setting the baseline. There's a. There's a lot of gaps really, really in the level of planning that builders do. And not just operations either. We can go beyond operations, we can look at all aspects of a residential building company. Marketing has all got to be planned. You've got to plan how much you're going to spend, how much you're going to budget per lead, what you're going to do and when sales, that's all got to be planned in terms of targets. And that obviously then correlates to your marketing. Your financials have got to be planned because we've got fixed expenses in business and they all need to be covered. And if you don't cover those sufficiently, then you're going to be running at break even, or worse, you're going to be operating at a loss. So planning applies to all aspects of running the building company. It's incredibly important with any business. But with a business that runs on high revenue and low margins and wafer thin margins in a lot of cases, it's absolutely critical that builders get this in place.

Yeah, we've all heard that quip around. If you don't have a plan, you got a plan to fail or I can't remember exactly what it is right now. Why do you think that is so prevalent that? A lot of builders know the importance of planning and they may even put a plan in place at some point, but then they don't follow through with that plan or they don't get around to planning the next time.

Yeah, there's three levels, I guess, isn't there? There are those that don't have a plan and do no planning. There are those that do a plan, but then like you say, they don't actually look at the plan throughout the year. And then we got the level three. They create the plan and they look at the plan. And a lot of this, I think, is what you focus on improves and. And it becomes your North Star. So you know what needs to be done in all aspects of your business throughout the year. And if you're constantly referring to the plan, you're actually measuring what you are doing and then you see the gaps and that's where your focus goes. So I think that's a really big part of it. And I think the exciting thing for us is the amount of data we have to back this up. So like I said at the beginning, where it's best practice, it's, you know, everyone tells us to do this in business, but now we've got got hard data that actually shows that the builders that do do this are the best performers. The guys that spend 31% of their time working on their business instead of in their business. Those are the guys that get the best returns. And when it comes down to planning, just simply having a documented plan results in builders having a 2% higher markup. I mean, that's extraordinary. Just the process of planning is actually worth $100,000 a year to a typical building company doing $5 million a year in annual revenue. That's money you cannot afford to leave on the table just by doing one simple process.

Yeah, that's something that always blows my mind. You see a small number like a 1 or a 2% change in markup or margin. But in this industry, that can be significant amount of money.

Yeah, and what's really important is we're talking markup. But that hundred thousand that goes all the way to the bottom line because your fixed expenses are your fixed expenses. You know, whatever you increase your markup by will translate to an increase in your bottom line. And that can be quite significant, really, especially I mean, even if you're hitting the benchmark of 10% net profit, and I'd argue if you're. If you haven't got a plan in place, then you're probably not quite there. But even if you were hitting the benchmark of 10%, an extra 2%, that's increasing your net profit by 20%. That's extraordinary. But we're not just talking about business plans here either. We're talking about planning in general. And when you look at things like organizational charts, that is having a plan around your organization, who does what. And what we've seen in the data is the builders that have an organizational chart, which is a very simple thing to put in place. They effectively buy back three and a half hours per week of their time. So they're working three and a half hours a week less than other builders. And that equates to over four weeks a year, which you can be pretty productive in those four weeks or you can go off on a cruise. Yeah. Either way, it's a great result for putting an organizational plan in place.

It's such a. Well, it seems like such a basic thing to do as well, which may be why a lot don't do it, do you think?

Hard to say. Hard to say why builders don't do it. We should really ask that question in the survey.

If not, why not?

We're very focused on who is actually doing it, but I think that's a really good question. Yeah. Why not? Yeah. I guess they just can't. Can't see the importance. And maybe we all have good intentions about we'd like to do what we'd like to do, but unless we really understand the value of just doesn't get high enough up the priority list. And we know builders are incredibly busy, so there's always fires to put out that. Yeah. Kind of take precedent. But again, better planning that stops those fires from ever breaking out in the first place.

Four weeks a year is a massive amount of time. Massive.

Yeah. And it really does correlate to what Andy tells us in the success stories that he shares with us every month on our team meeting. We're always hearing about these builders that, you know, that have been coached for a year, two years, and they've gone off on these holidays, like two, three, four weeks, even longer. I mean, he has shared stories about guys going off for months and the building company still operates without them. But yeah, again, this is the data correlating to what we actually see happening.

Yeah. Maybe there's a correlation to visualizing how you delegate down the chain.

Visualizing how you delegate. Are you talking about going through this organizational chart? Yeah, yeah. Look, I think that's a big part, the whole visualization as well. So being able to see that org chart and see the future clearly. Yeah, there's a lot of science to back this up. I know back in the day when I was racing sports cars in England, at the start of the race, I'd look at the grid and I'd look at who was around me, and I'd visualize the start of the race and how it was going to pan out. Now, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, but having that plan gave a very clear idea about what was going to happen in those first few seconds when adrenaline is pumping and, you know, you're not thinking clearly.

All right, well, let's dive into the meat of what we promised then, Russ. If planning is important and one of the biggest problems that builders are facing is not having enough quality leads, how are they going to change that in 2026?

Yeah, quality leads is a really interesting one because I feel that it does require the owner of the business to really look in the mirror if that's the situation and accept the reality of the situation. And that is, if they don't have enough quality leads, it's because of the actions that they've taken or failed to take over the previous 12 months. Now, a lot of builders, they blame a lack of. Of quality leads on the situation that they find themselves in. You have low margins, struggling to sign contracts, but they still don't take any action to address that challenge. This is what we've seen, again, in the data. We've seen builders nominate that as their number one challenge. But then we've been able to correlate that against the actions they've taken. And we can see that they're only investing 1% of their revenue back into marketing. And that's the first thing you've really got to address. Because if. If you want more quality leads, 1% of your revenue is not enough to feed that business. You've got to be investing 3% of your revenue back into generating more demand for your business. And I guess if you can't afford to invest 3% of your revenue, that clearly shows that you've got a very different problem. It's because your margins are too low, and your margins are too low because you don't have more demand than you can supply. And the reason you have more demand than you can supply is because you're not spending enough money on Advertising. So it's really simple, but it's a vicious cycle that a lot of builders do get caught up in. And over time, that does affect your mindset, I think, and leads you into a lot of false beliefs. We hear false beliefs around advertising. Yeah, advertising doesn't work. I've advertised and I just get rubbish leads. Yet again, when we dig deep, we find that those builders are not responding to those leads fast enough. So that means other builders are talking to the leads and by the time they speak to them, the leads say, yeah, no, we're okay, we're not interested, whatever. And they think they're time wasters, but they weren't. They were good quality leads, but they were taken from right under their nose. So I think a lot of this, yeah, if a builder finds himself in a situation where they don't have enough quality leads, it's all about education and false beliefs, really. And as well, it's that word quality, isn't it? We're seeing builders say they're not just saying they don't have enough leads, they're saying they don't have enough quality leads. And the number one thing that you can do to generate quality leads is, well, educate the marketplace because that makes the leads better quality. If they're better educated, their expectations are more in line with what's going to be delivered, so they're always perceived as being better quality. And the number one best way to do that is through a content marketing strategy. And it's never been easier than it is now to produce content. I mean, it used to be a very big investment, take quite a big commitment. But the tools are available now and I know you've produced a fantastic tool, Will, in one of our action plans for our members, where they can create this content quite easily. So the opportunity is there for every single builder to be able to do this with minimal effort. But that's only one side of the coin. You've got to produce good content, but then you've got to amplify it with paid advertising. So those two go hand in hand. But when you do those two things and you're investing 3% of your revenue back in, you're going to have more demand than you can supply. That means your margins go up and you won't be complaining about a lack of quality leads ever again.

What do you think that perception around builders not wanting to invest in marketing comes from? And is it related to that association that they've wasted money on marketing before?

Yeah, invariably it's because it hasn't worked for them in the past. And whether that's they've done it themselves and it hasn't worked or they've given it to an agency and they. The problem with our industry is it's very unique in terms of the sales cycle. It's extraordinarily long. So yeah, we hear a lot of general marketing advice about the sales cycle and self liquidation, which means you spend X amount on Facebook and you get the sales and it covers that and it's free and you just scale up. Well, that doesn't work in building. The sales cycle is way too long. You got to have a bit more of a strategy around prelims and getting self liquidated at the prelim stage. But even that doesn't come within 30 days. But the real, the real problem is a lot of agencies simply don't understand this. If they've not worked successfully with residential building companies, they have very little understanding about the whole process. And that leads them to follow a process, a general process that might work for most of their clients and they just end up burning the builder's money and they'll focus on things like views and clicks, all these vanity metrics that mean nothing. And even the conversions that they focus on, they're meaningless as well. The only thing that matters to a builder is number of marketing qualified leads that have been generated. And then we look at how much was spent on a campaign divided by how many marketing qualified leads. Now we have a cost per marketing qualified lead. Is that viable for our business? Can we convert a high enough percentage that make these numbers work for the business? And without understanding all of that, the structure of how marketing needs to work and how much they can afford to spend and the timeline that it takes because a lot of the time they don't even give it a long enough timeline before they make that call that it's not working, unfortunately it is never going to work. But even if you get all those things right, so you get all the front end right, you, you, you sign up with an advertising agency that understands our industry, they understand exactly what they need in order to make this work. So they, they drive you to get the content that they need as well. Landing pages are good, everything's good. Even if you do all that, there's still builders that believe that marketing doesn't work. And that's because they haven't got the next step, the sales process. And if you don't have your sales process firing, what actually happens is all these good quality leads come in. But because they don't get followed up properly or effectively. The perception is that leads were no good and the leads were good. It was just your sales process was effectively no good and again, led to that misconception. So, yeah, there's quite a few reasons as to why builders. A lot of builders believe that advertising doesn't work. And, you know, it's a lack of quality leads coming into their business, which is the. The real challenge.

So if we were to put a bow on this section, Russ, what's the first step builders should take if they're worried about getting more qualified leads in 2026?

Well, the first thing you've got to do, because obviously a lot of this stuff does take time. So you need to start by educating your opportunities that you do have. So you've got to work on your sales process. You've got to have a repeatable sales process in place, which might sound odd when we're talking about leads, but we've got to get that fixed up first. So you've got to get a repeatable sales process in place before you spend too much on paid advertising. You've got to have your content marketing strategy in place, because you can't just send people to a Contact Us page. It's not like 30 years ago where you could put an advert up in yellow pages and get inquiries and, you know, quote on people's own plans. I mean, you don't want to be doing that. So you got to get your content in. So you've got your sales process in place. You've got to get your content marketing, and then you got to amplify that content by investing 3 to 4% of revenue. It was always 3% was a number. But what we've seen in the data this year, it's going as far as 4%. And those builders are getting exponential returns on that 4%. But, yeah, if you can follow that process, then you will never have a lead problem again.

I guess you don't want to jump from 0 to 4%, though, without any of those systems in place, like you said.

Now, that's a very good point. You never go, like, straight in. Okay, they said 4%, and now I'm going to have all these leads. No, you've got to get all the other components working, and that is why you scale up slowly to make sure all your conversion points are working.

Okay, well, let's move on to the big problem number two, which is around profit and margin. So for the builders out there that have ever felt like they're not making enough profit in their company, how can they change that in 2026?

Well, low margins and profit, it comes down to one thing. It's the 101 of business. We all know it, but we tend to forget it and overlook it. And that is supply and demand. When you master that formula and actually cap your supply and generate more demand than you can supply and then increase your supply, as long as your demand keeps incre. When you master that, you will never have a margin problem. And that's because you've got a cure. People that want to build with your company and you've probably got a backlog of 12 to 18 months of people that are prepared to wait to build with you. So this is always what it comes down to. Most builders that struggle with low margins, it's because they're chasing work all the time, they're chasing cash flow. They have to sign every contract that they've got as a premium. Every prelim must go to a contract because their business depends on it. And you never want to be like that. We like to work on a two to one ratio with our members, which means they're always focused on generating two prelims for every contract they plan to sign. So if they've got their business plan set up for 2026, they're looking to sign 2010 contracts for the year. Then their focus is to how they get 20 prelims signed. Yeah, they're looking at two, up to two a month of prelims. That's their business plan. And then they get to this situation where they're never reliant on a prelim going across the line because they've always got another one in their back pocket. And this creates real, genuine scarcity and urgency as well, because, yeah, they use it in construction, in conjunction with construction slots, which means they have finite capacity, a limited amount of supply, which is the key to this formula.

And.

And it means that when they're actually talking to potential clients, they make them aware of this limited supply in terms of when their job can be started. And they've got one slot in April, they've got another one in November, and they've got three people coming through the prelim process that all want their house started as soon as possible. So the first one to get to a point where they can sign a contract, put a deposit down, they're going to get that first available slot. This helps focus the client's mind, getting all those selection decisions done and all the other decisions that need to be made in order to move forward. This makes selling absolutely easy for builders but when you can fill up your pipeline easily, this is how you keep putting your margins up. It's why we saw the very best builders just put their margins up extraordinarily easily during the COVID boom. And the ones that didn't obviously got caught out terribly with low margins committing to too many low margin jobs, which wiped out all their reserves in a very short period of time. But that really is at the heart of this supply and demand. You've got to master that formula.

The genius of construction slots. As you were talking then, it just reminded me of an interview I did with Jim Schneider from Schneider Construction. It must have been a couple of years ago now. But Jim was talking about how he always struggled with sales. He didn't feel like he wanted to be salesy or talk to try and close people in a conversation. And the concept of construction slots totally reframed his thinking around that process because it automatically created scarcity without him needing to force it down their throat.

Yeah, we hear this a lot, don't we? And it's almost like the builder moves from one side of the desk round to the client side. This is the situation that we're in, this is what we need to do. And all of a sudden they're working with the client, they're not trying to sell the client, they're not trying to pressure them, which most builders hate doing. And so it becomes a very consultative process, which builders love.

So what you're saying is the financial outcome, the profit, the margin is really a sales and marketing problem, or is there another layer to it?

Well, sales and marketing is a big part of it. But what we really see, and it's the first thing that we always address with builders when they come to us, is the financials and in particular financial literacy. And this was really borne out in the SOURCI survey again this year where a lot of builders on the lower revenue, you know, we're talking 3 million and below in annual revenue, really don't have a good enough understanding of their numbers. We're talking about the basics, markup and margin, but work in progress accounting adjustment, that is so misunderstood. And the trouble is when you don't understand all these things like markup and margin, work in progress accounting adjustment, fixed expense ratio, when you don't understand these fully, you have a false impression of your business. And the most dangerous belief that we see with builders is the belief that they're doing better than they really are. And it's a lot more common than a lot of people might realize. And when people believe that they're doing better than they are. They don't really have any incentive to fix the problems that are going on in their business, which is typically low margins. And especially in new construction, where these companies are cash flow positive. The positive cash flow masks a myriad of problems going on underneath the surface. So they just push forward on these low margins without realizing just how dire the situation is. So we always work with builders to help them understand their financials. First and foremost, get accurate financial reporting in place, because the moment we do that, it leads to a shift in mindset. When a builder realizes how little he's really been earning and the fact that he's been declaring profits that were way higher than he's actually been really making, and he's been paying tax on those profits as well. When they go through that experience, they get very angry. But then once the anger passes, they become very focused and determined. What that leads to is a change in mindset on pricing. They use the pricing for profit calculator, which calculates a net profit margin. Rather than focusing on the gross markup, they use that and they start adding their net profit margin to jobs. And now they realize how much they really need to be charging. Now, I'm not going to pretend that if you're working on 15% markup, you can suddenly go to 33.3% markup overnight, because that's not going to happen. And most builders will say, if I put my prices up to what you're telling me, I'd never win another job. Now, that's not entirely true because we've seen a lot of evidence that shows builders can put their prices up 3, 4, 5% overnight, and it doesn't make one bit of difference to the outcome. However, if you want to be sitting at those benchmarks of 33% markup for new construction, which will clear you a 10% net profit on top of a significant market salary, then you're going to need more than just putting your prices up. You're going to need a mature marketing system and a documented sales process to enable that to happen. But financial clarity, financial understanding, financial. I guess literacy is paramount because until builders really understand what's going on in their business, they're just not driven enough to fix that problem.

Yeah, whenever you talk about understanding your financials, I always think about Ryan Stannard from Stannard Family Homes. I remember interviewing him, and the thing that really stood out to me, he's known as the poster boy of investing in marketing, like investing in marketing when he was growing and didn't need to so he could have that pipeline you're talking about. But my understanding of how he got to that position was first he really started to understand his financials and his WIPA calculation which gave him the confidence to invest in marketing because he knew exactly how much money he could invest in marketing confidently. And it was so he had to inverse that situation. If you're worried about leads to be confident about investing in marketing, you gotta first figure out whether what your financials are doing.

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think Ryan will mind me sharing this because he speaks about it quite openly. But the work in progress accounting adjustment was quite a difficult thing for Ryan to accept because we were telling him that he wasn't as successful as he thought he was and all this equity that he thought he had built up in his building company didn't really exist. And his accountant was telling him one thing, we were telling him something different. And it's a very hard thing to accept when you do have a bit of money in the bank, albeit not enough to pay the tax bill that the taxman was asking for. And when he went through that situation for a second year running when he couldn't pay his tax bill, he threw his hands up and just said, look, there's obviously something wrong. And now just the previous year Ryan had been saying to me, we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this because he just would not accept it. But after, after a couple of years of going through this and not, not understanding where the money had gone, he said, okay, like show me what I need to do. And when he actually followed our training and started doing this calculation, his financials started to make sense at long last. And once they made sense, he then understood exactly where he was and what he needed to change. And that was his pricing, which he did. And then he got immediate results straight away because it's a lot easier to put your prices up than a lot of builders realize a lot. And doing it with confidence as well. And that comes from knowing your numbers. I think when you realize that you're actually not making any money out of the price that you would have charged the client. And if you, if you charge them this price, yeah, you're only making a small percentage, but at least it's a net profit. When you understand that, you go into that meeting really confident you're not going to be out negotiated by anyone. You don't care how smart and clever they are, you know your numbers inside out. The kind of confidence that brings to a meeting is extraordinary. And we know in sales confidence. Confidence sales. But yeah, from there after, obviously the next step is to ramp up and, and that's how Ryan went from 3 million a year up to 15 million a year. But he did it profitably. So many builders do that and they do it a loss unfortunately. But Ryan did it profitably, which was awesome.

Yeah, it's great story. All right, well, let's move on to the third and final problem or challenge that builders talk about. And that's systemization. It's around not being ready to scale because they don't have systems in place. Where do you think this problem comes from?

I think businesses just grow and evolve and they're all centered around the owner and there's just never enough time. And yeah, we hear it all the time, don't we? It's just quicker to do it myself. And systemization, well, I mean it used to take a lot of work. It's a lot easier now with all the tools that are available. It's quite extraordinary how easy it is to build standard operators in procedures, which means you can delegate more. But that's at the heart of it. Yeah, if you want to scale a building company, you got to put systems and processes in place and then you got to back those systems and processes up with exception reporting, which shows you when things are slipping through the gaps. But this is where a lot of builders hit this glass ceiling. It's because they're just not systemized and then they end up throwing more bodies at the problem. And a lack of systemization means they're not as efficient as they should be. And that leads to hits on the profit. And then they find that they've built this monster that they've got to keep feeding. And it's a horrible situation to be in, but it's not easy to get out of. And builders like Ryan have gone through this. Ryan was in the same situation where he knew that he needed to change, but he was working flat out in a business that wasn't making any money and he realized the only way he was going to get out of this was to work even harder. And yeah, this is the unfortunate reality for a lot of builders. It's not a long term thing, it's a short term thing, but you've got to dig deep. So Ryan set his alarm clock up for 3:30 in the morning to work on systemizing the business to create those systems that were going to allow him to buy back his time. And yeah, literally a few, a few years later he's off Taking six week holidays, he's working less time and he's doing what he wants to do with his life. But it's not a magic wand. It does take a bit of work to get there.

Yeah, that's what the data told us in this year's saucy survey as well. Right. In terms of it's a short term pain of putting in the extra hours for the long term gain of having more freedom and responsibility to be able to take time off and also delegate to the rest of your team.

Yeah, there was a lot of data around that, wasn't there? Because we're analyzing so many different aspects of running the building company from what the builder's pulling out as a salary, what they're seeing as a net profit, what those two figures look like combined. But then how many hours are they working as well? And yeah, we were able to see that building companies that grow and are more systemized actually results in the builder working less hours a week. And I think over the course of the year, you might recall better than me, Will, because I know you're knee deep in the data at the moment, but something like 250 or 350 hours a year less the owners of larger building companies are working now, if you let that sink in. One of the most common objections to builders not wanting to scale is that they think scaling getting bigger means more stress. But it's actually the opposite because the builders that have scaled are actually working less hours and they're more relaxed. So the data is irrefutable. Systems are at the heart of this.

Yeah, I'm trying to track down that number right now, but struggling to do so. But it certainly came out that working harder didn't necessarily equate to more profit. That's for sure. Like some of the builders doing over 60 hours were making less than the builders doing 40 hours that were running the big feed.

I think we equated over a five year period, the decision to not document processes cost a builder 1.2 million in personal wealth. That's massive.

Yeah.

How that 1.2 million is then going to compound over the next five years extraordinary amount of money that is being left on the table.

So what does it look like then for builders that want to systemize in 2026, but they obviously have failed to in the past. Maybe they're, you know, they've just got busy or they've been caught up running the day to day of their business. How can they change that?

Yeah, well, this is a good time to be thinking that way. And it all comes back to where we started this interview and it's with a plan and what a great time to be, you know, to be planning is right now, looking ahead at 2026, get very clear on what it is you want to achieve and get those numbers, get a business plan together so you know exactly what the outcomes are that you want to achieve. And then once you understand that, it becomes very clear what the building company needs to look like in terms of its resources and then what the top end looks like as well in terms of marketing and sales. Because, you know, it's very clear what needs to be achieved in terms of lead generation and sales in order to, to get this outcome. And then at the heart of it obviously is going to be systemization. And you might have a clear idea on what it is you're going to systemize in your business. But this is where a bit of guidance and a bit of expertise can really shortcut the process. Because if you just go fix in the things that you feel need to be fixed and improved and systemized, you're going to get so far. But if you follow the guidance of someone that's done this a hundred times or thousands of times before with different building companies, they actually know the fastest what's most important so what to work on and in the right order to work on those things as well. So you can actually shortcut the process and save yourself a lot of time by tapping into that expertise.

Yeah, it sounds like the solution to the first two problems we discussed, which were around financial literacy and your profit and margin and also your sales and marketing. That's all about systemizing those areas of your business, right?

Yeah, that's right. Systems are the backbone of everything. Yeah. And it's never more important than in a business with a high revenue and low margins. So important to get that part right.

Well, for members of APB out there, if you want to start planning for 2026, I'd recommend doing the quarterly Strategic planning Action plan. Even if you've done it before, dive in. And it's a great starting point to get yourself back in that mindset of planning for the new year. Russ has mentioned a lot of stats today about from the State of Residential Construction industry report. The 2026 report lands in February, but you can pre order it now. So so we'll share a link in the show notes if you want to get your hands on that straight away and start benchmarking yourself against some of these industry standards that we've mentioned today. But Russ, to wrap things up. Thanks so much for sharing all those insights about dealing with three of the biggest problems that builders are facing at the moment and have done for a long time. Any final thoughts heading into 2026 that builders can take forward?

Yeah, don't be complacent, especially if you're running a larger building company and you think things are going well. Take a moment to look at this industry report and benchmark your building company against what is happening in the industry. Because if you can pick up another 5% on your net profit, which is quite easy to do from the building companies we've seen, even if you're doing 10, 20 million, that is a lot of money you're leaving on the table. So don't get complacent, have a look, benchmark your building company and then set about making those improvements.

Awesome. Well, thanks Russ. Hopefully all the builders listening can take on some of your advice for 2026.

Thanks, Will.

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