229. How Elite Builders Scale With Andy Skarda

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builders Secrets. In this episode, I interview APB's head coach, Andy Scudder. Andy shares real results from our elite mentoring clients in 2025. He goes over all of the key metrics they track on a weekly basis and looks at where these builders did fewer jobs, signed bigger contracts, and still were able to grow their revenue by over 30% and maintain their margins, which is the most important thing. Even more importantly, Andy also dives into how these builders have rebuilt their business so they can get time back with their families and improve their health. If you want practical insights on how you can apply some of these learnings to your own business from some of the top-performing builders in our community, listen to this episode. This episode of Professional Builders 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 at apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

Your business is a reflection of you. In Business Coaching, we are training the builder to become the general manager of the business. In Elite, we're taking that general manager and turning him into a CEO. I had a client who his specific goal in coming into Elite, he literally came in and said, I need us to structure this business that I can take Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off. I want to pick my girls up from kindergarten and I want to be able to spend time with them. And that's what we did. We built his business in such a way that he did not work Tuesdays and Thursdays. And he made more money in that year of elite than he had been when he was working 60 hours a week. High performance is always balancing stress and recovery. So when you're able to focus on more things, more things improve quicker. And that's really what drives the results.

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 Scarda. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Will. Always a pleasure to be here.

For those of you that don't know Andy, he's the head coach here at APB, and today he's going to reveal some of the data around how our elite mentoring clients performed in 2025. But this is not just a pitch on how good our coaching services are. This is about what the practical applications for our listeners are today on what you can take away from the highest performing builders in the industry and apply to your business. So we're going to try and make it as practical as possible. Andy will obviously do a little bit of showboating as well.

I'll do my best to curb my enthusiasm.

Good show, actually. Good show, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Yes, very, very good. Very good.

It's always a good laugh, especially for a Seinfeld fan, I think. The trail onto that.

The funny part I always, I can't get out of my head, the fact that Larry David used George Costanza in Seinfeld was modeled on his reality. And the Seinfeld episode that blows my mind is the one where George gets fired on Friday. And goes back to work on Monday as if nothing happened. And when his boss says to him, but I fired you, he says, oh, don't worry about that. It's okay. That was last week. And apparently that actually happened to Larry David. I mean, it's bizarre. Anyway, we digress. Let's not do that.

No, I mean, I could talk about Seinfeld for a long time. Yeah. One of the great characters, George Costanza. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. What is Elite Mentoring, Andy?

Well, it is our top tier of coaching, basically. We change it. One of my favorite buzzwords or whatever is the fact that words create worlds. So we separate it from business coaching, where the focus is on the business and coaching builders to make that as efficient as possible and as profitable as possible because of that. In the elite side, we've gone to mentoring because it becomes a much more holistic picture. We go beyond the business. We actually start to get into the client's personal lives. And the rationale behind that is a couple of things. Number 1, your business is a reflection of you. So we can take it so far in business coaching, but there's a point at which the only way it will keep improving is if you keep improving. So there's a stronger emphasis on leadership. And I guess the functional difference there, to go back to the way you introduced this podcast, would be In Business Coaching, we are training the builder to become the general manager of the business. In Elite, we're taking that general manager and turning him into a CEO, into the owner of the business rather than the general manager. And that's probably the functional difference. By the time people come into Elite, they've already realized that it's not physically possible for them alone to do all the work that needs to be done to get the business to where it needs to go. They've started to build a team. What Elite does now is gives them the extra skills they need from a leadership perspective to take the foundation they've built in business coaching to the next level. On the personal side, we also understand that because they are leading the business, their well-being is critical. So what we now start to look at is, is the business serving the rest of your life in a positive way? So are you able to get to the gym often enough? Are you able to get enough sleep? Is your cortisol through the roof because you're not exercising and you stress to the max? Are you able to play golf strategically or just from the physical release perspective often enough for it to have that effect? What's the business doing to your marriage? What's the business doing to your relationship with your children? By taking it into that space, what happens now is we critically assess how does the business need to be repositioned in order to support the life that those people want to run. And really, if you think about it, cut through all the technical jargon, at the end of the day, that's why we all work. We want to be in a place that what we are doing economically is going to support the lifestyle that we want and build a financial legacy for our descendants on into the future. That's the focus. So, we get into some really interesting stuff. I mean, I think about my elite clients over the year, over the years, we've had some people that are measuring their body fat percentage. And we literally every week are looking at where that is and seeing how that's tracking. We've got people that are working on their golf handicap. And they set themselves a goal on where they want to be in a year. To keep this in context, they are improving their body fat percentage and/or their golf handicap while their business continues to improve. Okay, it's not, it's not this at the expense of that. It's this as well as that. So that's kind of the overview of where we take it. And it's really from our perspective on a foundational level designed to accelerate a builder's movement through our professional builder levels. So we find that business coaching is really effective at taking people from level 0 to level 4, by which stage they've got a marketing engine that is delivering consistent leads. They're starting to have a team built. And then what we find is from level 5 onwards, that momentum slows down significantly if they're only seeing a coach once a month. So with Elite, we up that to the fact that they see their coach every single week. And what we find is that that gives it the next punch just to take them through levels 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and then get to become a certified professional builder.

So it sounds like it's about the speed of progression as well, because I imagine in business coaching relationships, you're still having personal conversations about where they want to take their own personal life and their relationships, et cetera.

Yeah. The constraint in business coaching is that because it's a once-a-month physical one-on-one interaction. I mean, obviously, we give people unlimited email and phone support, but the real focus comes in that coaching session once a month. There isn't enough time in a 45-minute to an hour session to go deeply into those other things. You end up having to be focused very narrowly on the business and keep your fingers crossed. Now, Does that mean we never have those kind of conversations in a business coaching session? Of course we do. Sadly, though, they are normally the negative impact of those things not having been addressed now start to impact the performance of the business. Okay, because the builder has been working 97,000,000 hours a week and over weekends, his marriage is in pieces. And now he's going through a divorce with all of the physical and emotional damage that that causes. And he's trying to run a business. Yes, it does come in, but it's sadly in the business coaching environment, it's often only when it gets negative that it gets to that point. What we're trying to do in Elite, because we have the extra time, is give it the attention that it needs before it gets to that negative place and turn it into something. I mean, I had a client who his specific goal in coming into Elite was, had two young daughters, He'd had a hardworking but largely absent father, and he didn't want to go through the same thing with his kids that he'd been put through. So he literally came in and said, I need us to structure this business that I can take Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off. I don't want to work on Tuesday and Thursdays. I want to pick my girls up from, from kindergarten, and I want to be able to spend time with them. And that's what we did. We built his business in such a way that he did not work Tuesdays and Thursdays. And he made more money in that year of Elite than he had been when he was working 60 hours a week the year before. So that's the kind of thing that we look at.

I love how specific that goal is because it's symbolic as well. The fact that you can take the Tuesday and Thursday afternoon off is symbolic of everything else.

Exactly. Take a vacation every year without fail. And it's much easier in the Elite mentoring space to be able to get people to see the value of rest. You know, I mean, high performance, no matter what you talk about, whether it's sport or anything else, high performance is always balancing stress and recovery. That's what you're doing. And even at an elite athletic level, I know you know about my love for rugby union. I just recently read Sam Whitelock's book called The View from the Second Row, where he attributes the longevity of his career to having been the roommate of Brad Thorne, who by then was already 32 years old, and Brad's entire focus was on recovery. So, yeah, play the game flat out, but then make sure that there's the ice bath and there's the massage and there's the sleep and there's the, you know, all of that stuff. And Sam Whitelock absolutely attributes the 168 caps or whatever it was that he got for the All Blacks back to not just focusing on performance, but also focusing on that recovery and making sure that he was ready the next week and his body was ready to serve what he needed to do. So there's a lot more of that in, in what we do in Elite.

Bit of a sidetrack just on the golf handicap thing. I'm not much of a golfer myself, but one of my close friends who I've known since I was 8 years old, he was always a run-of-the-mill golfer, averaged His handicap was between 15 and 20, floated between them. Over the last 18 months, he's gone from that level and his handicap is now 1. Turns out the secret is you move next to a golf course. He moved into the street of where a golf course was and just plays pretty much every day now.

Well, there you go. It's that 10,000 hours principle. You know, the more you do something, the bit— well, not always. I mean, you know, we always debate the difference between experience and expertise. Expertise is doing something often enough to realize what you're doing wrong and correcting it. That's the, that's the key.

But I think there's a lot of parallels in, in what you get out of elite mentoring in terms of the consistency of showing up and being held accountable and just doing it over and over again.

Absolutely. And the power in that weekly meeting rather than the monthly meeting is huge, you know, because you've got that extra time, you can be a lot more focused on smaller chunks of the whole. And that, you know, I mean, like anything, anything you focus on improves. So, when you're able to focus on more things, more things improve quicker. And that's really what drives the results.

So, how do you track the results in Elite Mentoring? You've spoken about business results and personal or quality of life results. How do you track all of that?

So, we basically use two things in both our business coaching and our Elite Mentoring programs. We give every one of our clients what we call the KPI Workbook. It's a combination of about 22 worksheets that we've developed here at the APB over the last 10 years odd that we have proven help builders to build a more professional business. And essentially what happens is we use the KPI Workbook to track the business metrics, and then everybody in Elite also has a personal strategic plan where we set those personal goals at the beginning of the year, and then we review them every quarter to track progress. Now, obviously, it's a lot of what we're tracking is very easy to track, like, is your golf handicap improving? Is your body fat percentage dropping? Are you working less hours than what you were working? You know, now that needs to be intentional. So that goal of let's work less hours, Well, the reality is there's nothing less that needs to be done to get the business to where it needs to be. So how are we going to work less hours? Well, it's going to come in two areas. One, efficiency. Can we do things better, quicker, more efficiently? And then secondly, I need some help. I maybe need some specific people to come on board to take some of the load. You know, so it's, again, it's balancing that What's it worth to me in my life, long run, to spend Tuesdays and Thursdays with my growing daughters compared to sitting in the office for that time and maybe producing a bit of output? That's really what you're measuring on an ongoing basis.

What are some of those metrics that you're looking at from a business perspective?

Well, they're pretty much going to be the standard KPIs. We obviously start with marketing. We believe that's where all of this starts. We look at obviously what the business needs in terms of qualified leads to be able to meet its sales targets. We look at process obviously in marketing and sales to make sure that is as efficient and as quick as possible, that people are getting moved through the, you know, the stages of the sales process. We're obviously tracking the financial metrics very closely because the entire business is reflected in the numbers. A lot of builders battle with this concept initially that every single decision you make, good or bad, is reflected in your P&L. It's as simple as that. But that is the truth. So we're obviously watching revenue, we're watching gross margin, we're looking at net margin, we're looking at the cost of running the business, the overheads and fixed expenses. And then obviously on the balance sheet side of things, we want to see that reserves are being built, there's enough cash in the business, and that the equity is growing. And those are kind of the headline things that we would look at.

Okay, well, let's dive into the results for 2025 then.

Yeah.

And let's start on the business side. So all of those metrics you just reeled off, what were the big shifts you saw in the elite clients? Or potentially there weren't shifts, but what have you got for me? I know you've done a whole bunch of analysis, and funnily enough, last year You sent them to me beforehand, but we're doing a nude run today.

There we go. Okay.

This is the first time I'm going to hear it too. So live reaction, live reactions.

So very interesting. And I think because of your skill set, you'll find some of this quite interesting. Generally, people would expect that this kind of podcast would be us tooting the horn about how many things have grown and improved. So just because I'm me, I'm going to start at the other end. All right. So I'm going to start at marketing and what we saw with marketing across the group, '24 versus 2025, the actual leads, so sales qualified leads in the group dropped by 24%. Now that might sound like a negative stat, but just hang on because I'll show you how it's positive in a second. So sales qualified leads across the group dropped by 24.5%. We did have positive growth in some individual cases, but looking at the group as a whole, 24.5% reduction. The minimum positive growth was 5%, 5.3%. The maximum positive growth, 533%. Now, you know what it's like to grow leads at 500%. So that's a pretty interesting stat overall.

I guess it depends on how many leads they had initially though.

That's 100% true.

Yeah, it depends on how many leads they had initially, right? Like maybe they had one lead and if 500% on that then is 500 leads, that's a lot. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, 500 sales qualified leads for a building company is a lot.

Oh sure, and you're exactly that. That's why I started with the group because that particular stat is an outlier. It's nowhere near, but what I'm really saying is the minimum growth in this area was 5.3%, but overall, in terms of pure volume of leads that builders are working with, it dropped by 24.5%.

Right. Yeah.

Now, if you look at that in isolation, what did that do? Well, that impacted the number of contracts that were signed, because what we now had was we had less sales-qualified leads that went through onto less contracts signed year on year. And that number was 11.7% less contracts signed. But again, we had positive growth across individual people where again, the minimum was 12.5%. So overall things are dropping, but individually we're seeing that in most cases it's growing. Now, what does that mean? Well, we've got less sales qualified leads. We've got less contracts signed. So that should mean that these builders are doing worse than what they were. Well, until you get to the next stat, which is contract value, because now all of a sudden what we find is that across the group, 36.2% increase in the average contract value for Elite clients. So I think you can see where this is going. We've got—

see what you've done there.

Well, We've got less leads converting into less contracts, but they're bigger and they're significantly bigger. And again, there, if we look at the individual stat, the minimum positive growth that we saw in terms of contract value was 6.8%. But as people that have been part of this podcast historically will know, that relates to revenue. So what did we expect? We expected to see if the contract's value went up, then did the revenue go up as well? And surprise, surprise, yes, it did. And at a very similar rate. So revenue year on year grew by 34.6%. Okay. But we always talk about the fact that, you know, revenue is not where the focus needs to be. Revenue actually is, can often be deceiving. Because at the end of the day, it's not an indicator necessarily of the business being in a better place than it was. All right. So here again, 34.6% overall, minimum positive growth in the revenue space, 11.9%. So how did this group get better? Well, interestingly enough, on those bigger contract values and that higher revenue, we saw very little change in the gross margin percentage. It in fact only went up by 0.3 percentage points across the board. But obviously what you've got to understand is that's now on bigger contracts and a bigger revenue number. And this lever is a huge one for people to get their heads around. Essentially what this is saying is You can make more money by doing less work if margin stays the same, and it is a positive margin, obviously, and you grow your revenue, not the number of contracts, but the size of the contracts. So what we've got with this elite group is they are doing less jobs, but those jobs are bigger, and they're maintaining the quality of the output that they're putting in. And that's what's keeping the gross margin stable. And to be totally honest, go back to what you said about the growth in the number of leads. Most people, by the time they get to Elite, have stabilized on their gross margin anyway. They're sitting pretty close to the benchmarks of 25% and 33%.

Yeah, that's what I was going— I was just going to ask that, like, how close are they to the benchmarks? Because a lot of builders out there that are new to APB, that 25% gross margin can feel aspirational or potentially too far into the future.

I mean, I remember in our early days when Russ and I would talk to people about 25% or 33%, they'd laugh at us. They would literally say, you're mad, you're insane. But the secret to it is the right people who understand the value that a professional builder brings them. They're happy to pay the additional money because of the additional value. So again, why we didn't see a lot of movement here was that there wasn't the need for it. Most of them coming into Elite were already at that kind of 25% or 33%, depending on whether they're building new homes or renovating or remodeling. So that's where they're at. And how did they do that? Well, pricing discipline, number one, and cost control, number two, is how that gets kept at that level. In the elite group, we've actually got people that are exceeding that 25% level on a regular basis. They kind of average 27%, 28%. So again, do the math on a bigger revenue and a bigger individual contract value, you're making above 25%. And because you are running your business more efficiently, your overheads are lower. And therefore, what does that do? That kind of takes us to the final numerical stat, which is net margin, which only really moved up by— it was about 0.98, so I rounded it off to 1%. But the reason that we got even that growth was the fact that overheads are being controlled. By the time they get to Elite, they're a lot more comfortable with numbers. They're a lot more comfortable with budgeting and predicting what's going to happen quarter by quarter, month by month, which means you don't see those wild fluctuations in things like that. The business is lean, it's efficient, and because of that, grow the revenue, grow the contract value, and the margin does the rest of the work for you. So that's kind of the overview. If, I mean, if I summarize it, revenue up 34%, project size up 36%, Some growth in gross and net margin, but not a lot across the group. And really what that shows us is that revenue is scaling and where you can combine that with cost discipline, the growth in profitability obviously improves materially immediately. So there's the overview. Now you've heard it naked with no, with no preempting.

Is it the same with net margin as it was with gross margin in terms of most of the elite cohort hitting that benchmark of 10% net?

Not necessarily when they first come into elite, but the beauty in the group at the moment is we have some people who've now been in elite for 2 years. So they kind of came in in '24, stabilized the business in '24, maybe came in at 5% to 7%, but have now grown that to 8% to 9%, and in some cases, 10% and above. We have an elite client that is regularly nudging that 15% margin. Now, anybody listening to this is going to go, oh, well, we want 15% margin. We always put the proviso on it, be careful, because at 15%, your competitors can undercut you and still make decent margin. The particular client that I'm talking about is in a fairly rural area outside of a big city, and he's the big dog. In other words, he doesn't have the level of competition that somebody in a metropolitan area would necessarily have.

As you're talking, I feel like we need to do this analysis based on time in the program at another point rather than consolidating it. Because if you go like year 1, year 2, there's going to be a big difference in the changes there.

Look, I mean, again, I'm always honest when we have these discussions. Does every single elite member come in and get everything positive immediately? No. We have some people that come in and in that first year things can actually go backwards to stabilize them and get the business back to where it needs to be. And then from there we can accelerate.

If you had to summarize what was implemented across the group to increase the revenue, increase that contract value and maintain the margins.

Marketing predominantly. Niche definition, avatar definition, tightened, focused away from generic content into very, very customized. And again, it comes back to we've got the time. So all of a sudden, our elite clients are doing actual historical client analyses. They're doing market research work with the clients. They loved working with, who brought them profitable work. And the beauty in this cohort is that they've got a group of clients that they're on such good terms with. And I'm thinking of one of my clients particularly who did this. They're testing all of the marketing materials and collaterals that they're coming up with on real clients before they release them. So now what you've got is you come up with a lead magnet, that is the result of actual market research with real clients. You send that to one of those cohorts and you say, what do you think of this? And the kind of message you get back is, I wish I'd had access to something like this. This would have made my journey so much easier, better, cleaner, quicker, whatever the adjective happens to be. So now what you're doing is you're not going out to the market with some kind of generic throw it against the wall and hope it sticks. You're now going out to the market with an offer that is of real value to people that would use your services. And that just obviously converts quicker, cheaper, etc., etc., and brings you, because it elevates the perception of your business as a professional building business, it brings you those better quality of clients. And when you think about it, one of the fundamental marketing things that we teach our clients is that if you can enter the conversation that's going on in somebody's head, your marketing has done its job. So you imagine somebody that's sitting at home saying, "Oh, man, I really want to build a custom home, but all I've heard is horror stories. What do I do if the builder goes broke?" And the next thing they see on Facebook is an ad from you that says, "Would you like to build a custom home, but worried that the builder is going to go broke?" You're in my head, get out of there. And it's that kind of specificity in marketing. It's not, hey, do you feel like building? I mean, that's just so broad and generic. It doesn't address the problem the client is trying to solve. We've said this all along, that margin is fundamentally driven by marketing because to achieve those 25s and 33s that we know a lot of people look at us and go, that's not possible. We always find when we break it down, the reason they can't achieve 25% is because they're talking to the wrong people. And what often happens in the guys that are achieving 25% is the client that worked with the guy that can't, who had a nightmare experience at the cheap level, when they come to build their next house, they say, I'm never doing that again. I want to find a builder who's going to charge me more, but I don't have to have sleepless nights while the build is happening. And that's exactly the point, is a professional builder isn't fighting with 5 other builders and cutting his margin to get the work to keep his team busy, which is language that I hear regularly from people when they first come into the program. What he's doing is saying, I don't want that kind of work. That's the kind of work that makes you go bankrupt. I want a decent margin work with people that appreciate the value of what I bring to their build process. That's probably the one you're nailing me on. If there was one thing that changed, it's that specificity of marketing and the fact that it's not generic. It's very, very scientifically based.

Yeah, I'm seeing a real progression from when builders first get exposed to the concept of lead magnets and marketing and providing value to their clients all the way through to this, the elite mentoring group, which are going beyond your generic lead magnets, analyzing their customers, actually providing something of high value. And With AI these days, creating something like that is far easier than it's ever been.

Absolutely. In the particular client's case that I'm thinking about who did this really well, they did use a professional copywriter on the front-end content that they created, but then they used that content to train their AI to keep the tone and the level of communication consistent. On the secondary stuff that they created. And just if we're talking about the technical side of this, they went very video heavy. So they took blog content and then one of the two owners jumped in front of a camera on site and talked people through that same blog content and showed them on site how those elements actually played out in the design or the build or the whatever, you know. So really a combination of absolutely very, very customized client-centric messaging delivered with the most efficient channel and methodology available.

Yeah, I think you're touching on there, like, if you have one really, really good high valuable piece of content that can last you for such a long time because you can break it down into all these little other bits of content and Okay, quality of life results. So we've touched on some of the business metrics, net margin, gross margin, revenue, marketing. Talk to me about the personal aspects of the Elite Mentoring results.

So I mean, we've touched on, you know, kind of some of the highlight things, as in, yeah, people are thinner, slimmer, more lean muscle. I'm trying to think of a relationship that was in trouble that got restored. To be honest, we didn't really have any of those, but we certainly have had people able to take a holiday or vacation every year. It's not, you know, 3 days, it's 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 5 weeks at a time. Yes, we've had the golf handicaps, we've had people able to support their children's sporting desires. So all of a sudden we've got both the money and the time away from the office capacity to take our daughter, who's a gifted soccer player, and really expose her to the potential for an English professional team academy slot in the not too distant future. And we can legitimately go down that discussion because we know if we had to be in the UK for 3 weeks at a time, 6 times a year, We could do that and our business would continue to perform and support our lifestyle. So, it's not that people are gambling, it's now people can be intentional about those kind of things. Those are probably the highlight things that jump into my head. I mean, having time to spend with kids growing up. And obviously, the beauty in that is if you're putting in the extra time when they are younger, as they're at school longer, you win that time back. But you've weaned yourself out of the business for that time and you've built the team. So, it really puts you in a place where you're able to focus on the strategic stuff and actually leading the business rather than if you don't do the estimating and the sales pitch and do the planning of the whole construction process and then be on site to make sure it happens, you're not doing any of that anymore. You are just making sure that those things are happening with the team that you built to give you those 2 afternoons off. And if you choose to continue to take those afternoons off, that can be to go and work on your golf handicap, for example.

Yeah. What are we talking about in terms of body fat percentage changes and things like that? What type of shifts have there been?

Frightening, like 32s down to 12s and 13s.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Might have to start using that in our marketing messages.

Well, yeah, I mean, look, it's— I wish I could say that was the default. It isn't, sadly, but this particular person is just— they are a driven individual. And when they started to see that, you know, because they didn't believe they could take the time off. I mean, you only get to that level if you are watching your nutrition, your sleep, and your exercise. One of the three won't get it for you. I mean, that largely, to be honest, that kind of body fat percentage is created in the kitchen, not in the gym. Of course, yeah. But the truth is, to eat properly, you need time and money. I mean, most of us end up eating crap, and I'm allowed to use that word because it's a real word, because it's quick and easy. You know what I mean? Because we don't have the time to actually one, source the organic, healthy foods that we really need, and two, to prepare them the way that they need to be prepared. Now, all of a sudden, your business doesn't need you 90 hours a week. Well, now you can start to focus on those things that are important.

Now, it's also a stress reaction, right, as well. Like, if you're not getting enough sleep, you're stressed at work, you're more likely to eat poorly because it's like a temporary satisfaction that you get from that.

Yeah. I happen to be talking to the client that's heading for the 11%, 12% body fat., and I said, in my humble opinion, as a man who is bordering on clinically obese, I think 12% is too low. I don't think it's healthy for you. He didn't seem to want to take my advice in that area for some reason. I don't know why.

It is the extremes, I guess, if you go top to bottom, but I guess that's like some people are just, if they're dog with a bone kind of situation, just go for it.

Yeah, but I mean, again, if I was going to look at that, what would I say to you? I would say to you that across the group, healthier physically, relationships healthier, generally quality of life significantly improved.

It sounds like, I mean, it's a byproduct of the business stuff. Well, it's— Yeah, your relationships are only going to improve if you're not totally stressed out at work and worried about the finances and up, you know, half present at home because you're worried about what's coming in the inbox, all that kind of stuff.

And because of that, you're not sleeping, and because you're not sleeping, you're irritable, and because you're irritable, your kids don't want to be anywhere near you. There's no question that moving the focus from just the business to let's look at your life, the outcomes that we get from that are way more than the sum of the parts. Once all of that starts working together, I mean, you think about it, you're sleeping better, you're eating better, you're exercising more often, your brain capacity is up. Because of that, you're much more creative in your solutions, you're much calmer. Just everything just improves from there, you know.

So what's happening in 2026 then with the elite clients? I know we've got some new building companies coming into the program and then we'll have another group come in later in the year as well. They bring them in so that there's adequate space to get the attention they need. What's it looking like for them?

Well, that, I mean, that is exactly the runway that we're on. We've got our coaches identifying potential candidates early. And preparing them for it. So starting to show them this would receive this kind of attention if we were in elite. And to be honest, we say this all the time, we don't sell coaching. What we look for is a place where the solutions we have to offer solve the problems that that client has. That's the reality. We're not there to manipulate or influence people to do something they don't want to do. So really, if you look at it, what business coaching is doing is taking people out of the survival mode that they're in, putting them into a place where they can actually prosper, they can thrive. And then what that gives them is the resources they need in order to be able to go to the next level where they're actually prosperous and they can start to build a legacy. So it's, you know, that's what we're going to do. We have 100 and very close to 150 now clients in business coaching. We look at the fact that we would expect that round about 20% of our coaching cohort would be in Elite. So we want to see that number grow to reflect that kind of 20% across the board. And we've got people now that have gone kind of through 2 cycles of Elite, and some of them have decided they need another one. Others have decided to drop back to business coaching. They've got the business to a place now where it has the momentum and they're feeling like they know what they're doing. They don't— what they need is a once-a-month accountability check-in, numbers review. They don't need to be doing the every-week scenario. And from a coaching perspective, that's the biggest accolade you can get. When a client says to you, I'm self-sufficient, you know your job is done. Great.

Well, Andy, thanks for coming on today and sharing some of the results from 2025 and a bit more about what it looks like to be in the Elite Mentoring program with our highest performing builders. Where can people find out more about Elite Mentoring? And if they're interested about it, what's the process to get to that level?

Well, because I'm the one that always says it, if you're not yet a member of the APB, you have to be a member. So you know, get off the fence and start doing something about your future. Obviously, our progression is that, you know, members that are ready for it come into Business Coaching, and then people that are in Business Coaching that are ready would move up into Elite. So I think there's two pieces. If you are not yet a member, become a member. If you are a member but you're not yet in Business Coaching, the first step is to get into coaching. And what that'll do is that will develop your relationship with your coach, number one, and it'll obviously start to build the business to a place where we'll know exactly what needs to be fixed and you will have the money to be able to invest into the business, into the marketing, etc., etc., to actually achieve those outcomes. If you're in business coaching and this has kind of piqued your interest, chat to your coach. All of the coaches are involved in the Elite Program. We don't separate it from a coach's perspective. Our coaches coach Elite clients and business coaching clients, so it's pretty much a natural progression. I think once in the 8 years that I've been involved, we had a client that said, I'd like to come into Elite, but I think I need a different coach. I just need a fresh pair of eyes. And, you know, the coach was comfortable with that. I was comfortable with that. We looked at what the best fit would be, and we made the change. But that is unusual. Generally speaking, a coaching client would stay with their same coach into Elite. So just chat to your coach is the simple answer. Cool. And if you're not yet a member, you want to know more about us, jump onto the newly revamped APB website. And under business coaching, we explain how Elite works and what's involved and all of those things. You can get, you can get the basic information there as well.

Yeah, there's a page on our website which is all about Elite Mentoring, and on that page there's a link to episode 91 of this podcast as well, which was with Andy, yourself, and Russ and Skye talking about exactly what it is. So there's tons of information available if you want to dive in and learn more about it. On that page you'll see a great photo of Andy at the top there, so you'll know you're in the right place.

I don't think there is such a thing, but thank you, Will, I'll take it.

Well, Andy, yeah, thanks for coming on again, and let's wrap it up there.

You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

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