From High School Dropout To $15,000,000+ Professional Builder

I love water skiing, I love going up the river, I love getting out of the office. So without the systems being processed like they are, I was stuck in the business. I was in here day to day answering questions, all the rest of it.

Hey, it's Dave. Today we're chatting about the journey towards business systemization. I'm here with Ryan from Stannard Family Homes. I've actually got to know Ryan through the association of Professional Builders here in Australia, and I do quite a bit in that community, and I often find builders in particular are drawn to systems and processes. There are probably a few different reasons, I think. One, there is a natural way of doing things in the building industry, you, projects have a certain process that they follow to get done, and also typically a lot of smaller builders in particular aren't that great with systems and processes, so they're drawn to it and curious to it. But before I suppose I get ahead of myself, and firstly, just like to welcome you to the call, Ryan.

Yeah, thanks, David. Thanks for having me, mate.

Maybe to start, can you tell us a little bit about Stannard Family Homes and what you guys do and whom you serve? Yes.

So Stannard Family Homes, we're based in Adelaide, South Australia. We start. I started off as a carpenter, built my way up to running and managing this business, which is now about a $15 million business doing all custom homes. Yeah, to the clients around here in Adelaide. So, yeah, it's been a good journey.

Rock and roll. Now you don't get to a $15 million business just as a solo operator without process. So I'm, I'm curious, do you see yourself as a systems person like some people, it comes to them naturally and others just really don't like it.

Well, I probably wouldn't have said I was a systemized person years ago, and my wife would probably say I'm not systemized because I'm probably the messiest person going around. But how it all came about was, you know, I was running the business, doing it all on my own, and then I needed to implement more people to do more things. So what you need to do is if you think you're good at it, which most business owners probably think they're better than someone else at doing what they're doing. So you want to try and clone yourself, and the only way to clone yourself is to write the systems, basically.

So, yeah, I see it a lot. With builders in particular, it's really easy for them to remain small and have a solo business because oftentimes they're the technician, they Start out as the carpenter or the bricky or the sparky, and they just learn the business, business from the ground up, doing the work. But then they actually get trapped because of that. And it becomes very different because it's a different set of skills to grow a business. I don't know if there's anything that you can kind of speak to with regards to that and if you had any catalyst like, yeah, anything that kind of just made you go, I gotta change.

Yeah. And it's. If I hear from builders all the time, I made, I used to make more money when it was just me. Right. But you, you're a glass ceiling when it's just you, you can't grow and you can't expand your business because there's only one of you. So I would say that was probably me in the early days. But you need to grow through certain patterns of business to make it more profitable. So when you, when you're running the business yourself at say, between, you know, 2 and 4 million, you can run a building company at that with yourself and maybe a bookkeeper and run the jobs yourself. Whereas once you go above that, you need to build, you need to build a staff base so that they can help you to do what you got to do. So then that becomes a part of letting go. So you got to let go of what you're doing and let it go to someone else. So in that space, if you can systemize what you do dayto day, then when you go to bring in the next person to do what you want them to do, all they've got to do is read off what you've done. And I don't know, I don't know how many times I say to people around the office, if you do what's written in the manual, if that goes wrong, that's my fault. If you go and do something that's not written in the manual, that's your fault. And then you'll get into trouble for it. So I don't know that that quite answered what you were saying, but I went off on a bit of a tangent. So.

No, I think that one in particular is a great way to build a systems culture because then you kind of taking the blame off the individual if things go wrong, which I think is the right mind frame. Was there something like, how did you build the. The. I like the case for yourself because I chat with a lot of business owners and especially when they're small and they've got limited time and they're busy and they're Running around like a, a chicken with their head cut off. The idea of investing time and money, which takes resources and effort to building in the systems and the processes. Like how would you justify the cost and the effort of building and documenting systems?

It's probably the easiest question you could ask because you only have to do it once. Yes, I only have to do that once. And once it's once. I've done it once and it's written down and it's in System Hub, it's there. So then when I onboard a new staff member, the first thing we do is give them a login to System Hub and we show them the portion of System Hub. We actually show them the whole lot of System Hub because you can segregate it off. So you can only show them portions, but I actually show them the whole lot so that they can see if they want to go in there how detailed the rest of the process is and how their part of the process links to someone else's part of the process. But you, you open up System Hub and you go, you're going to go from here to here. This is going to be your part and you work through it. Then, then it saves them knocking on the door, walking through the office, saying, oh, Ryan, how do I do this? Or Ryan, how do I do that? Because it's all documented in there, it's on video, it's all, all written and videoed in there. So they can literally just watch it and if they don't understand it then, then they can come and ask you. But you find people will go through the information that you give them rather than look stupid by coming and asking you questions. So you only got to do it once and then once it's in there, it, I don't say once it's in there, it's in there and you don't have to change it. It's an ongoing process where our systems get updated like yearly. So every time a new staff member comes in, we'll go through them, we'll make sure the systems are still going to work for that staff member. And obviously things and points change a little bit by personalities and skill sets and stuff like that. So you update minor bits all the time. So it's a, it's a never ending sort of thing. The systems of a business, in your.

Language, how deeply you've got this, because this is just intertwined now into the DNA of the business and the way that you do things to the point where new team members come on board and the first thing that they See is this is the way that we do things here. So very quickly, if someone isn't going.

To follow that, they're either going to.

Leave or opt out or like you're projecting right up front, we have a way of doing things well.

It was just yesterday I was throwing my sales guy under the bus, but it was just yesterday I was in a meeting with my sales guy and there was a couple of things that he'd done with a client that wasn't as per our manual. And I literally said to him, do you need to read the systems again? Do you understand how we've agreed as a company that this process works? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I know. Do you just get caught in the moment? But yeah, but that's it. So. And the biggest thing about writing systems is once when you're writing them yourself and it's just you and maybe one other person or two other people in the company, you can write them and be a bit of a dictator of how you want, want that to work. But what I've found is over time, so we've got staff of, I reckon about 14 at the moment. So when you've got that many people, you don't want to be a dictator. So you want everybody that's involved in using these systems, or this is my opinion anyway, the. To have input into how the systems are written so that you're actually discussing every process in the business. And then I can put my point across about how I believe something would work and why it would work that way. And then I'll have the staff give me an opinion on why they think what I am proposing is no good or why that. And then I can. We can find a happy medium of how we believe it's going to work better as a company because you have a staff member in a certain area won't understand how they affect the rest of the business. Whereas as a business owner, I'm looking at from the start right to the very finish. So you need to make sure that this part's going to intertwine with that part's going to hit with that part all the way through. So it gives a consistency of flow right the way through the business in.

Those early days and you touched on it when you're first getting the systems in place and you can be a little bit more of a dictator. Here's how it's going to work. How did you get started? Like, was this just you? Did you have an apprentice or someone who's coming along, a systems champion? How did you get things off. Off the ground, yes.

So at that stage, I, I had computer software that I wasn't using to its full potential, and systems was a part of that. So I hired someone that knew nothing about the building industry at all. So absolutely nothing about anything to do with the building industry at all. And, and I just made him interview us and start documenting it, and then I helped document it with him. And then we started to work through that process and then he interviewed everyone that we, we had and, and, and got it all sorted to lay out. And then obviously once we had it documented, then we kind of documented and edited ourselves. But it was just getting started. Yeah, it's just getting it done. And, and to think that now I've got every part of my business right through from the day someone contacts us, right through the day we hand over their house, and every bit of financial stuff, how a job supervised, Everything's all written in a manual now. So it, it works amazing. But you think, how do you get to that? And it's like all you're doing is literally putting on paper or putting in a video exactly what you do. So if you do one task, and that one task may take you an hour, it may take you five minutes, it may take whatever, it might take you three times as long to do that one task if you're systemizing it as you're doing it. And then once. The thing that I found amazing about systemizing things is you, once you document something, you actually find the flaws in it. So when you go and do it every day, you just do it and it goes along. But then when you put, put pen to paper or you shoot a video of it or you do whatever, you watch it and you go, well, I could do that better or I could do that better or I could actually get someone else to do that. All right, so it creates at the, creates sort of the plan of the business as you're going through it by documenting it.

I just love the way that you think about this and the way that you see it rolled out. Again, I keep coming back to this idea of how, how did you stick with it and go through the whole way? Because I know early on you don't see a lot of these wins straight away. Like you put a couple of systems in place, it's you and that person who's interviewing you. There's only a couple of team members like to have the vision that you had to then go, I need this to build this business. Like, yeah, and stick with it. I'd love to Know more about that.

So I've got, I've got a wife and four kids. I love water skiing, I love going up the river. I, I, I love getting out of the office. So without the systems being processed like they are, I was stuck in the business. I was in here day to day answering questions, all the rest of it. I can step out of the business for weeks on end over the Christmas break. I left the office on the 18th of December. I remember that because it was my, because that's my birthday and I didn't come back to the first week in February. So I was away for seven weeks and didn't do anything and then walk back in here. And that's a quite a stressful time for builders because we're on holidays, then we come back and we've got to get it, get the wheels rolling again in a business. And I, I wasn't here for any of it because everything systemized as to how it needs to happen. So. Yeah, but without the systems, you, you end up stuck in the business. You can't grow the business. You end up just being the business is you. Yeah, yeah.

I think you provide such great inspiration, I think for other builders that see this to go, oh, I can see, hey, I'm like, Ryan, if Ryan can do it, I can do it. The reality of building a business is there are challenges, it is hard work. And I don't know if you've got any insight into ways that you've kept systemization front and center or even some of the war stories where it hasn't quite gone right and how you've managed those situations.

Yeah. So probably I'll go on to go to a story I, I believe, which has been the most monumental part of having systems in place. So my daughter, she's now Erin. She's now, what is she, 20, turning 21 this year? She left high school a couple of years ago and I was trying to work out what she wanted to do. I didn't know she was interested in the building industry. And I said, shoot for the stars, find it. You know, I'll try and find a path for you to go do whatever you want. And she said, oh, I want your job. And I, I said straight out to her, I said, that's the easiest thing I could ever give you. And, and she's like, oh, yeah. So then she come and started working for us. So I'm old school, I'm old school in the building industry. My dad was a builder. I learned from the school of hard knocks. So I I bought her into the business and I said right, she was interested in interior design and stuff like that. So I started her doing an interior design course while she was working. But then I started her working with the interior designer that I already had. The amount of questions that she asked the interior designer that I had at the time the interior designer quit in her. In about her fourth week and I and I had opened up System Hub Tour. Everything in there was systemized. Exactly what this person was doing was systemized. So we went over it, my daughter and myself and we rewrote the systems to change how she thought that they would work. And we discussed them the whole way through. Within the first six months she did I think about 12 sets of selections on her own. The first couple of sets I sat through with her. But then she did. Yeah, 12 sets on her own within the next six months. Then she went on from there to do it for 18 months on her own. And now by. Right by reviewing the systems manual with her and running through things, she's now the assistant manager. Yeah.

Of.

Of the. Of the company. So now I, I'm. I'm just about to. I'm about to start another business pretty much out in the riverland which has just been flooded in the. In recent times and there's a whole heap of houses that need to be rebuilt. So I'm actually going to go out there as of the middle of the year and build a heap of houses for. For 18 months or so and she's going to manage the business and that wouldn't be possible without the systems manual to be able to operate by. So she. We nearly 21. She'll be basically managing. I'll be there to help her with parts of managing our 15. It'll be 15 to 20 million dollar company. So yeah, that's all systems.

I. You've given me some inspiration for some. It's a little pet project that I've been working on for some time now. I have realized that I think this idea of the systems champion is quite possibly the best career path and gift that you can give.

Yeah.

A new apprentice who may have gone to uni and learned how to do the thing. They are the technician but they don't yet understand how the business works. They are the perfect person to go into an organization, be curious enough to want to learn everything. They get to work with the key leadership team to learn what they're doing and extract it and work closely. They get known by the business owner for solving a problem that the business owner has had A real challenge doing like a lot of business owners struggle with systems and process and it sets them up like it's the best gift. I want to figure out how can I carve this out as a career path? Because I think it's. Well, yeah, I wish I had it.

If you, if you, if I could give anyone advice on that is if you have someone that you believe will end up managing the business one day, make them your systems champion. Start them at the bottom, work them their way through writing the systems and understanding it. Because Erin wasn't around back then, but if she was, she would have been my systems champion. But the, the guy, he's no longer with us now. He left to move to Queensland not that long ago but he within about three years knew everything about the business. He became the go to person in the business whenever need something that need to understand something because he'd written the systems manual. So now Aaron's been operating and writing the systems manual and updating it since he left. But now she knows every little intricate bit of the business by rewriting the systems manual. And on our list of things to do, on our company list of things to do before we go to the, before we go, we go to the annual retreat with the APB which is in Fiji this year. Before we go to the retreat, one of the list of things to do is rewrite the systems and make sure the systems are all valid. Because our systems manual, it's not updated is no good. It's useless if no one's doing it. And once people understand how it all works, they don't need to read it anymore. But they still need to refresh it and understand that the key points are. And then when you have meetings with management or, or your managers or whatever, the manager knows how you should be doing things. So as I said before with my sales guy, you know, if they're doing something that's outside of this line, you need to pull them back into line with where the, where the systems are going to be because it's operating on what, how we've agreed the company is going to be, not how I've told them it's going to be how everybody's agreed that this is the right way to do it. So you got to keep them in line, those qualities.

And you'll see it in your daughter. You're probably a little bit biased because she's your daughter. But what qualities make a great systems champion? Like if you were trying to spot someone or tell another business owner what qualities they need to exhibit what comes to mind.

So you've got to be open minded. So you've got to be open minded. You've got to be a good listener. Yeah. But then they've got to be a go getter as well. So you've got to be. It got to be hard enough to challenge the people that are giving you the information as to why that's the right way to do it. So. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's got to be. You've got to be able to listen. Yeah. And you got to be able to understand what people are trying to put across. So yeah, it's. Yeah, it sort of maybe stumped me a little bit that one. But yeah, it is. I'm just trying to think back to when it was all going on. But yeah it is. It's just listening and being able to get it down and it's probably not, probably the best way to go about it is in the early days when we were interviewing for it, we videoed it or recorded all of the, the meetings so that you, so that the systems champion, whoever's documenting it can go back and go back and perfect it. And then once we perfected it, we videoed it all on online like loom programs like that videoed our screen and, and have all that in there because most of what we do is on a screen these days. So there's probably bits of where we could video the stuff that happens on site and stuff like that. But through the times that we've been through in the building industry, everything's changing. It's been a changing landscape so much for the last few years and it'd be interesting to see where it goes the next few years. But, but that's it. Through, through those hard times, being able to lock down on our systems has been really important.

The last question I'll ask is around the when is the right time to start? Because it's interesting that you're now thinking about starting this new business. So now that you've got the benefit of seeing a business that has systems versus one that doesn't and I often say it's like night and day difference once you get a good base set of systems down, when you think about approaching the new business, from what point do you start to think about systems and building a systems culture?

So the new business is, it's still under, it's still going to be the same business, it's just a different arm. So it's actually just implement the systems that happen here. It's, it's Rinse and repeat. It's literally the systems that we've got here. Future plan is for. We're based in Adelaide to go somewhere else in Australia and just set up a satellite business using the systems that we've wrote. Is a. Is a future. Is a future plan of mine. When it happens, I'm not sure, but yeah. So then I can literally go through the systems and go, right, this is what we need to do. This is what we need to implement and create a path. So where our systems are at now is nearly. It wouldn't take too much work and we would be able to franchise the systems of our business. But I'm. I don't want to be a franchisee. I don't want that. I'm happy building houses and doing what they're doing, but that's how. How important it is. But also it makes your business salable because you're not the person that's the. That's operating the business. Like, as I said, I went away for six weeks over Christmas, I bought a caravan. I'm going away for six weeks in June, July and the business will still operate. Whereas if I was needing to be here, that stuff wouldn't happen and it wouldn't be salable.

So I've seen a. An H Vac company out of the US where the business owner developed his best practice systems for the way that he runs his H vac business. Now what he does is he buys underperforming H vac businesses, moves his team in, they roll out the systems, let it run for 12 months and then he sells the business.

Yeah.

And every time he's done it, he's just been leveling up, getting bigger exits. And it's extraordinary to see. I mean, the, the systems really are the asset.

But. And the, and the thing is, systems are easy.

Yeah.

Because it's just all it is is documenting what you do. So, yeah, if you think creating systems is hard work, it's not. You literally all you're doing is putting down on paper or in a computer program exactly what you do. Yeah. And, yeah, it's not, it's not science, it's.

Yeah.

You don't have to be a scientist, you don't have to be a mathematician. You know, all you got to do is just write what you do in paper and, and video it.

So.

Yeah.

And it's that consistency, which is what I see with you. It's like doing that over a long enough period of time to where that asset builds up. Because I always notice that the first system you put into place might save you a little bit of time here and there. Second system, a little bit more time. But it's not until you've been doing it for six or 12 months and then you look back and you go, every one of those systems now is saving me a little bit. And your business is completely unrecognizable. But a lot of, yeah, business owners, they give up within the first three months and they go, I tried that. And Joe didn't follow the process. Systems don't work for me. Yeah, I can't be systemized. And then they give up. I don't know if you've got any tips for someone who's in that mind. Space.

High, slow, fire, fast. Yeah. So what, what we try to do is hire people that will follow a process. And in our recruitment, if someone doesn't follow a process, we won't hire them because they're not going to fit in our business if they don't follow a process. So if, if that person won't do what you want, they need to go and run their own business. Yeah, because I probably wouldn't have done what someone told me to do. But, you know, so it's, it's getting the right people to do it. But if you've got the systems written down and, and we've proven this so many times, you can employ people that have no idea and within a quick space of time, within three to six months, you can have them doing something that someone that's been doing it for 20 years wouldn't be able to do as quick or as efficiently as you do or as they do by reading your systems manual. So you don't hire. We don't hire people who know what they're doing. We hire people that we can train the way that we want them to do it. I love this.

I'm going to have to have a part two with you.

I know.

We'll get to catch up in person at the retreat. If people want to keep a little bit of an eye on the work that you guys do, best place to send them is just the Stannard Family Homes website. I'll link to that. Yeah.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. And just wanted to say a huge thank you for being an inspiration and an example of what a systemized business looks like. I think we need to put more businesses like yours front and center so some other builders and other industries can go, I can do this too. It's. It's not that hard. It's just commitment and consistency and it's.

And it's not. And, and, and most people that meet me understand I'm just a knock about bloke. I. I got expelled from school when I was 14 years old. Started banging nails that day with my dad. Really? No formal education. Just followed through and got to where we're at today. So it's like, literally, I am the probably. If I can do it, anyone can do it, really. But yeah, it's. Yeah, it's just not that hard. You just got to write it down.

Perfect. What a sage word to finish on. So thank you again for your time.

No worries. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me. And look forward to the next one.

It.