Learn From Industry Experts

Real experience is about trial and error – but why make your own errors when you can learn from others’? Inside the app, you’ll have the opportunity to get help on the spot from Mick Hawes and a community of over X builders with the hard-earned knowledge and experience to help you avoid those same pitfalls

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There’s a lot to learn in this industry – which is why we provide access to a comprehensive resource library filled with tools, podcast episodes and articles on every topic you can think of. Inside, you’ll learn how to get more money and meaning out of your building business, and save yourself a great deal of time and stress in the process.

Leverage Our Ready-Made Network

The construction industry isn’t just about building structures – it’s also a great place to build a career, and that journey is easier with a strong support network. Inside The Builders’ Toolshed, you can chat with other members, ask questions, join our events and share your own experiences and insights.

The biggest challenge seems to be most builders (And it’s a male-dominated space) are awful at asking for help. But by understanding the role of a Construction Business Coach, you’ll understand it’s not about help; it’s about guidance, support and protection from the multitude of accepted industry practises that cause far too much unnecessary pain for the builder, their family, their team (Including subbies) and their clients.

You started your own business to have more Money, Time & Meaning in your life than you thought you’d have to work for someone else. As Dr Phil often asks, “How’s that workin’ for ya?”. Most builders work longer hours and take home less money than their team members, taking more risks and dealing with high-stress levels.

That’s not what you signed up for, and the role of a Construction Business Coach is to help you get what you wanted in the beginning!

When it comes to running and building a business in Gold Coast, it’s often a case of the owner being so involved they often “Can’t see the wood for the trees!” One of the benefits of hiring a Construction Business Coach in Gold Coast is getting a third party perspective. A Construction business Coach isn’t affected by the emotional challenges that come with managing you own money, team and clients, which can affect decision making. Having an opinion based on what’s the right thing to do instead of decisions caused by emotional distress and pressure is invaluble.

The Builder is often chasing what we call the “Apparent” problem. For instance the Builder isn’t making enough money, so their mind goes to “We need more work”. Unfortunately adding more work to an already broken system only leads to more stress, less time and less profit.

Having the benefit of experience that A Construction Business Coach brings having worked with other similar businesses, will save the builder a heap of wasted Money, Wasted time trying to learn by trial and error and a ton of unnecessary stress.

If you’ve kept track of the news over the past couple of years, you would know that many builders have gone under. In the 12 months from April 2022 to April 2023, almost 450 builders went under in Victoria alone. This is why hiring the right Construction Business Coach in Gold Coast is Crucial.

Just because a business is big doesn’t protect it from collapse. A large number of volume builders around the country have also gone bankrupt.

This is an excellent example of why you need to get the fundamentals of the business side of a building business right. The fatal assumption that nearly all builders make is because I’m good at building, I’ll be able to run a successful building business. Micheal Gerber, the author of The E-Myth, is famous for saying this is the #1 cause of small business failure.

The mistake builders make is assuming that the quality of the build is the thing that will propel their business to success, and it’s just not true. One major shift that will contribute to success is understanding your product is the quality of your client's experience, not the quality of the build. That’s an expectation of the client, not a benefit!

Walt Disney said, “Look around and see what the world is doing and don’t do it” Just because most builders do things a certain way doesn’t mean it’s right or the best way. So let’s look at some key strategies for Construction Business Success.

1. Don’t fall for the trap of thinking all people are priced focused. The fact is the vast majority want value over price. But if you don’t do well at being able to display and communicate value, your prospect will default to price.

2. You MUST charge for your quotes or proposals. Doing this for free sets up an improper relationship dynamic from the start, and you’ll be expected to do many more things for free throughout the project that will eat up all of your profit and maybe even cost you.

3. You must learn to plan and prioritise to have more time freedom. Most builders know how to prioritise and put things in the right order when building a house, but fall down putting time and effort into the most important things concerning building their business. You already have the skill. You need to use them to build your business!

4. Get clear on what your real purpose is! What do you want this business to do for you? Without clarity on this question, most builders have built themselves a job. Your business is an incredible platform that can deliver tremendous financial and time freedom to its owner. You need to know what that looks like. Then you’ll see the path to get there. This reminds me of a beautiful old saying from Alice In Wonderland: "If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.

What is the most valuable skill a Builder or any small business owner should possess to ensure a highly successful business? I hear you ask. The answer is probably not what you’d expect and not what builders give priority to learning. Developing effective communication skills is essential for every part of a business.

It’s obvious it’s important to manage your team, communicating with prospects, with clients throughout the building process or with suppliers and other ancillary businesses to the project. Quality communication will eliminate so many costly problems that consistently plague building projects. Yet it is rarely practised and refined despite its massive value to the business.

This is something a quality Construction Coach would help you learn and refine. It’s probably the best investment you could make in your business regarding the returns, savings and increased quality of experience for the team and clients.

It’s crazy that money and time are put towards software packages, ineffective advertising, specific tools, and machinery because the builder believes this will be good for their business. And they may be correct, but wouldn’t you prioritise the things that give you the highest return over improving the business?

Spending $30 on a copy of The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People and smashing Habit 5, “First Seek Too Understand, Then To Be Understood”, is hardly a substantial financial cost. The investment is in the time you put into learning and refining the skills in this chapter. I guarantee you it is a game changer for your business.

As I’ve mentioned, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” is the famous quote from Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland. It seems to be profoundly appropriate for Builders. Setting and achieving goals for your building business is essential!

The problem begins with the limited thinking adults develop as they go through the years, preventing them from finding goals that create enough passion and excitement to keep them from being distracted by the many “Bright, Shiny Objects” they think will help or fix their business.

Having a Construction Coach For Builders showing you a simple process to chip away at the self-imposed limiting beliefs is a great place to start. Getting rid of these destructive ideas like “Everyone is price focused”, “You can’t get paid for quotes”, and “It’s hard to get good people” (And the list goes on) will open up the floodgates of optimism and clarity as to what you could achieve with your business.

A goal has steps and measurements, just like building a house. Without these, it’s just a wish and every little distraction will get in your way and take you away from your objective. Then the rot sets in, and you begin to believe goal setting doesn’t work, and nothing could be further from the truth!

What if I were to tell you you’re wasting 80% of your time? I’m sure you’d think I was a fool and didn’t know what I was talking about because you work hard! You probably do, and I’m not saying you don’t. I’m simply suggesting that most of that hard work is wasted.

I can say this because I didn’t believe it when I was told. But I was given a process to measure the reality of my effectiveness, and it turns out I wasn’t wasting 80% of my time. It was closer to 95%. Knowing this creates such disgust, you’ll want to make significant changes.

We’ve been teaching Time Management and Productivity for Builders for a long time. I can tell you I haven’t met many people that work harder than builders! Have you heard the saying “Work Smarter, Not Harder”. It’s pretty standard, but what does it even mean? It doesn’t communicate what you should be doing differently. It can’t do because many have heard it, and few are implementing it!

The problem starts with the absence of goals, then a daily plan focusing on the actions. Then the skill needs to be developed to accurately prioritise instead of being influenced by the Urgent. (Urgent is an emotion and has nothing to do with important!)

This is a catch-22 scenario. You get many distractions without the focus of a high-quality daily plan, which in turn causes a lot of ineffectiveness. This leads to the belief that there’s no point in having a daily plan because you never get to it. So no daily plan! And around and around we go!

Everyone gets distractions or requests throughout the day that could distract us from our plan. Still, the absence of a plan means we have nothing to measure the value of new requests against, which opens you up to working on low-priority urgent (Not Important) activities again.

When a Builder joins our Builders Business Blackbelt membership, one of our Profit First Professionals puts them through a comprehensive Financial Health Check. Over the years, we’ve been doing this; not one builder was making a profit! Not one!

This is why it’s essential to have your Builders Coach offer Financial Management for Builders.

Let me clarify my previous comment about profit. We use and recommend the Profit First system created by Mike Michalowicz. This measures profit by putting a specific percentage of income into a profit bank account, and it never gets used to pay bills etc. The profit you measure on a Profit & Loss statement is fiction and not real. When was the last time your accountant put a wad of hundreds into your hand and said here’s your profit? Your profit is more than likely in other people's bank accounts, or it was used to pay off loans etc. So it wasn’t profit in the first place.

Implementing Profit First has proven to completely change the financial fortunes of every business implementing the strategy. And the best part is when the financial stress has been eliminated, many other problems disappear, or the intensity of other problems seems to dissipate.

Knowing your numbers and understanding your financial position on as close to a day-to-day basis is one thing you can’t ignore or give responsibility away to your bookkeeper or accountant!

We tend to change the whole focus away from Marketing with builders because most think that marketing is just advertising. So we encourage our builders to think “Attract”. Some Builders Coaches teach marketing and Branding for builders, but I’m not a fan.

If you think "Attract" instead and ask yourself these questions, What projects do we want to attract? & What kind of Clients do we want to attract? The critical question is “Are We Attractive?”.

The importance of the third question is the one that is rarely thought about. Many builders say, “We want to do these types of projects, and we want these types of clients” but fail to examine if the way they position themselves in the market and the processes they use to handle their prospects are actually attractive to those types of people who have those types of projects. Truth be told most of the time they’re not attractive to the people they’re trying to attract.

Plus nearly everything builders say on their websites etc is all about themselves and not about the fears, frustrations, wants and desires of the people they’re trying to attract. Your prospects aren’t interested in you and your business, they’re interested in getting what they want and solutions to their problems.

A crowd attracts a crowd. Just because many people do something a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the best or right way. Overcoming challenges in the building industry requires you to think and do differently!

Zig Ziglar, one of my first mentors, always used to say, “If you keep on doin’ what you’ve been doin’, you’re gonna keep gettin’ what you’ve been gettin' ”. 

Things have to change if we’re to improve the industry as a whole.

The common challenges are…

1: Financial Stress

2: Less & less personal time

3: Increasing costs and compliance

4: Meeting timelines

5: Aligning client expectations and budgets

And many more!

If the same practices and mindsets continue, then it stands to reason the same results will ensue. The exciting thing is there’s such little competition when you become professional, understand your ideal clients' priorities and concerns, build systems and processes that create more effective outcomes and finally understand that your product is the quality of your clients' experience (Not the quality of the build. That’s an expectation, not a feature or benefit!). There’s lots of room at the top and very crowded at the bottom. It’s your choice where you want to be. Don’t blame circumstances; make better choices!

I used to teach Time Management exclusively 30 years ago. And part of what I would profess is how to achieve a “Work-Life Balance”. Now I think it’s Bullshit!

Maintaining Work-Life balance as a Builder will put you on a hiding to nowhere. Things have changed over the past 30-40 years. Technology and expectations of the market mean no one respects personal time. Your clients want what they want when they want it. If you don’t deliver, they’ll go elsewhere.

So how do we still run a successful business and not go insane? Part of the answer is to create what you do both personally and professionally in such a way that you enjoy everything you do. You should have such great clients you’re happy to speak with them anytime. At the same time, you should be completely guilt-free for a round of golf during the week.

If we give away this idea that there are work hours and personal time and it’s all just one big series of enjoyable activities, there’s no need for breaks etc. Plus, you do everything with better energy and get better results!

Dinosaurs once ruled the earth, but if you’re a dinosaur in the building game, you’ll be extinct just like them! You must get comfortable leveraging technology for builders business growth!

We teach our members a process to get things that recur daily or weekly off their daily list by asking questions in this order.

1. Can I stop it? You’ll be amazed how many things you’ve hypnotised yourself into believing are essential, but if you never did them again, it would matter, at least would make a minimal negative impact. Opening up the opportunity to use that time and effort on high-leverage tasks

2. Can I automate it? This is where the technology comes in. Particularly in recent times, the opportunity to use technology to do so many things that most believe had to be done by a human can be handled by automation and software. You need to be open to it. The key here is to ask, “Who, Not How”. This means instead of trying to learn how to use the technology yourself (How) you find an expert in the space and employ them to implement and manage the technology (Who)

3. Can I outsource it? There are a ton of virtual assistant companies out there. The roadblock is, again, the builder thinks no one can do it like them. We struggled with this in the past in Builders Business Blackbelt. But now we’re seeing our members finding so much that can be outsourced they’re now managing teams of VAs

When we first opened the doors of our coaching business, we were getting what we thought were pretty good results. After we went from a standard one-to-one coaching model to a group coaching model based on building a strong Network and collaboration culture, we were amazed to see the enormous increase in the pace of progress for our members.

After the shift, our members' progress increased quickly by 400%. This meant they were getting results that previously took a year in three months. One thing I knew for sure was I hadn’t become a four times better coach. It was the community.

Belonging to a group that shares resources and experience meant each business didn’t need to learn everything by trial and error or build its systems and processes from scratch. They could lean on the community with any problems or issues, and there was almost always someone who’d had that problem before and had created a solution.

Many years on the depth of experience, knowledge and resources available for people entering this community means they’re moving at around ten times the pace of members of the original builders coach model!

There’s one important disclaimer. You must show up with a commitment to contribute and support. Asking yourself how can I help, what can I give, rather than what can I get. When you’re part of a community like this, it’s incredible!