The Good Builder Podcast

Australia tends to think it has home building figured out. Michael Hopkins isn't convinced. A bricklayer by trade, Michael learnt the trade in Wales, worked across Germany, and has spent 30 years on sites in Australia. He keeps going back to Europe to see how they build, and he comes home with the same message every time. On the way we put homes together, we are decades behind. In this episode he...

Every builder is up against the same question right now. How do you build more homes, faster, without dropping quality or blowing the margin? This episode makes the case for answering it differently. Az sits down with Adam Dawson, engineering and builder solutions manager at Pryda and a chartered engineer, to unpack why the industry stays stuck treating every home as a one off project, and what ch...

The Top 100 Queensland Builders report dropped on Friday. Most builders will scroll past the first 30 pages to see if they beat the bloke down the road. This episode is about everything else in there. Host Az walks through the read behind the ranking. It runs on official QBCC data, so no builder is missed, and it groups the franchise networks so you can see who the biggest really are. But this goe...

Most builders think margin disappears on site. Owen Chambers says it disappears earlier than that. Owen joins Az from The Professional Builder, the coaching team working with thousands of residential builders across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada. His argument is simple. Residential construction has limited upside and plenty of downside, so the game is not maximising profit on a...

Builders think their customers care most about build quality. Customers say it is communication. Az and the team from Increase Construction dig into where AI actually earns its place in a building business, from sales call coaching to customer experience, plus early findings from TGB's builder marketing survey. SHOW NOTES / DESCRIPTION What do builders think their customers care about most? Qualit...

A new financial year lands on 1 July, and it brings more than the usual housekeeping. In this solo Monday episode, Az runs builders through every change hitting their business in the same week. Award wages, payday super, expanded parental leave, tighter safety rules in South Australia, the NSW DBP Act expansion, and the permanent return of loss carry back. He also breaks down the headlines that ma...

Brad Acheson had his builder's licence before his 21st birthday. Possibly the youngest in New South Wales at the time. He spent the next two decades building under his own name in Dubbo, up to 35 homes a year, with a reputation the whole town knew. Then he handed that name over and joined Stroud Homes Dubbo. Not because the business was failing. Because he was the business. Every answer, every dec...

Most builds get into trouble long before anyone picks up a hammer. They get into trouble in the design. In this episode of The Good Builder, Az sits down with Vicky Cutler, a registered architect across New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria with more than twenty years in residential design, and the founder and director of Cutler and Co. Her argument is simple. The builder should be in the room...

Most leaders stay flat out doing work that someone else on the team could do, while the work only they can do never gets touched. That gap sits at the centre of this conversation. Az sits down with Dan from A Thousand Feet Deep, the culture and leadership business he leans on most, to work through a question that sounds simple and turns out to be the hardest one a leader can answer. What do you do...

Ask most builders who runs their HR, and the answer is "me." That's the problem. In this episode, Az sits down with Julie Bolitho, a recruitment and HR specialist who has spent close to 30 years in the building industry. She started at sixteen in a land surveying office, studied drafting at TAFE, and went on to work across the HIA, Apprenticeships Queensland and the Australian Industry Trade Colle...

Matt was never the classroom type. He left school without much love for books or essays, and for years he moved through job after job trying to find his place. What he found was the trade. In this episode, Az sits down with Matt from Vanstyn Constructions — a builder who turned hands-on instinct and hard-won life experience into a thriving business. Patios, carports, decks, renovations and extensi...

This week Az is back on the Monday couch with Josh Peapoint from Elevate Estimating. Josh has just returned from two weeks in Bali with his family. No phone. No work. Just time off. That sets the tone for an honest chat about something most builders never stop to look at: the way they actually run their business. The conversation starts with pricing. Diesel is coming down. The fuel levies that wen...

When an insolvency practitioner walks into the room, most builders assume it is the end. Hand over the keys. Pack it up. Game over. But that is not how Chris from Jirsch Sutherland works. In this episode, Aaron sits down with an insolvency practitioner who has worked on more than 2,000 matters. They call his kind the Grim Reaper of the building industry. The twist is that his first job is to keep...

Our first New Zealand builder steps onto the couch, and Aaron reckons he summed up everything TGB stands for in about thirty seconds. Dan Saunders started building in 1993 and formed DS Construction in 2002. In 2012 he built the first 8 Homestar-rated home in Australasia, the highest rating going at the time. Since then he's built close to 30 high-performance "super homes," helped get the Super Ho...

Existing property prices are starting to move. And it matters more for builders than most people realise. In this Monday episode, Az is joined again by Emily Pollard from Nesta Builder Brokers to make sense of what is happening in the market right now. They start with DropBee (dropbee.au), a live dashboard built by a developer on Reddit that maps property price drops across Australia as they happe...

Most builders have tried AI by now. A lot of them have also quietly pulled it back. In this episode, Az sits down with Anisha and Nayan from ScaleUp Smart to talk about what's really happening with AI in building businesses across Australia. The pattern is clear. Builders go all in. They hand over estimating, marketing, follow-ups, even answering the phone. Then they bring most of it back in-house...

Most builders know recruitment matters. Few understand it the way Luke does. Luke spent more than a decade inside building businesses before he placed a single candidate. Chippy. Estimator. Senior CA. Residential and commercial, on jobs from 200K through to 2 million plus. He has seen the industry from the tools, from the office, and now from the outside looking in. That dual perspective is what m...

The government has committed $2.4 billion to housing and infrastructure. The intent sounds right. More homes. More support for first home buyers. But there is a question sitting underneath all of it. Who is actually going to build these homes? Emily Pollard from Nesta Builder Brokers is back on the couch to work through what this budget push really means on the ground. We get into the trade shorta...

Most builders can swing a hammer. Far fewer can run a business. And the gap between those two things is exactly why, by Rod Frampton's own count, roughly one in 25 builders never makes it to a decade. Rod is the founder of Frampton Builders, a Brisbane custom home and renovation business that's been going strong since 2014, and more recently Frampton Clean Rooms, a pharmaceutical-grade fit-out com...

Everyone talks about "modern methods of construction" like it's something new. Kersten Gentle has a different take: the timber frame and truss industry has been doing offsite prefab for decades. They're the OGs. In this episode, Aaron sits down with Kersten, CEO of the Frame and Truss Manufacturers Association of Australia (FTMA), fresh off what he calls the most impressive industry conference he'...

The housing conversation in this country is stuck on one word: more. More homes. More tradies. More builders. Nagy Mourad thinks we're missing the word that actually matters. Nagy has worn nearly every hat in construction. He's a registered builder, a developer, and a trainer and assessor who spent more than a decade teaching Victorian builders toward registration. Before any of that, he ran natio...

Most builders don't lose their marketing because they're bad at it. They lose it because they get busy. In this episode, Az sits down with Drew, Sean and the team at Increase Construction in the TGB studio for an unscripted, real-world conversation about the problem nearly every builder runs into. You land a few good jobs, you feel sorted, so you quietly stop putting yourself out there. Three mont...

Happy Friday, and what a week. One of the biggest we have had here at The Good Builder. In this Friday wrap, Aaron runs through everything that happened inside TGB and out in the industry. We announced our Advisory Board, with MyConstruct and AVIA Homes the first two at the table and more names coming soon. We headed up to Twin Waters for the FTMA conference. And the next quarterly report is under...

Phillip Livingston is a trades coordinator at Vitaleese, a Melbourne-based home modification specialist working across aged care, NDIS, and private clients. They're a VBA-licensed builder, a registered NDIS provider, and an approved supplier under the State-wide Equipment Program. In other words, they sit right at the intersection of building work, compliance, and the people on the other end of it...

Emily Pollard from Nesta Builder Brokers flips the script this week and puts Aaron in the hot seat. The brief: how does a young, blunt, female broker market a business in an industry built on display home theatre and base-price advertising — without turning into the thing she's trying to fix? It's a working session disguised as a podcast. Emily wants to "set fire to display home marketing" but won...