The Good Builder Podcast

Floor heating might be the most loved feature in a home that almost nobody asks for — and once the floors are down, it's too late. This week Az sits down with Rick Florence, managing director and owner of Coldbuster Floor Heating, a business that's been in the Australian market for over 25 years. Rick reckons only a tiny fraction of people building or renovating ever see a floor heating quote befo...

Builders are being approached from outside the industry more than ever. Coaches, planners, consultants, software reps. All of them want the same thing: access to your trust. In this short solo episode, Az shares the background check The Good Builder runs on everyone who approaches the platform, and why builders should run it on everyone who approaches them. Two searches. Five minutes. Before a dol...

Solar and batteries are on nearly every new-home wish list, and hardly any builders are putting them in as standard. Az sits down with Gary Higgins, owner of Sunshine Coast solar and battery installer Halcol, to work out why, and what it's costing builders. Gary's path here is not the usual one. An electrical apprenticeship in Ireland cut short by the GFC, a stint in retail and business management...

Mark Sutton has just stepped into the GM role at Goop Guys, the surface protection business builders rely on at handover. He's spent his career in hardware, paint and construction materials, starting in his father's hardware store in Cleveland, Brisbane, then leading business development for Wattyl across Australia and New Zealand, growing a network of more than a hundred stores at Everhard Indust...

Az runs solo through the small, low-cost moves he's watched actually shift leads for builders — no bigger ad spend required. First, 3D walkthroughs and rendered tours of your own designs, including homes not yet built. Az's own experience — not a cited study — put these at roughly four times more likely to convert a visitor into a lead, with the added bonus of fewer variations once buyers can see...

Az sits down with Matt Hope, founder of Wattle Court, on building a franchise brand that is bigger than the person who started it. Hope has run building companies and led one of the strongest performing segments of a major group. Wattle Court is the first brand he has built from scratch, and he explains why he turned down the obvious name, what the wattle tree has to do with the first homes constr...

Alex Harris from Wattyl on the couch for the first time, and Bec from Adapt Modular back for a second run. They join Az to talk about what the construction industry keeps getting wrong about its people, and what a few operators are quietly getting right. They cover the difference between being hired for your ability and being hired to fill a gender target. The sites that still have no facilities f...

Az unpacks five red flags to watch for before entering a business partnership. As The Good Builder has grown, the partnership approaches have grown with it. Some are worth taking. Many are not. This episode covers the signals that show up early, what each one actually reveals about the person across the table, and why backing yourself is the first defence. Covered in this episode: The love bomb. T...

Josh Tyrrell signed with GJ Gardner Homes at twenty nine, opened in October 2016, and has since built around 250 homes across Warragul, Drouin, Morwell and Traralgon. Today he has 18 staff, an average contract price near $800,000, and a second office about to open in the Latrobe Valley. He got there by chasing the work the big builders avoid. Flat greenfield sites are a brutal fight against Metric...

Construction is one of the strongest performing sectors in the Australian economy right now. Louise Southall has the data to prove it. Louise is the Xero Economist. She joined Xero in 2020 and brings 30 years across economics and business advocacy, working with business organisations, councils, government agencies and charities. Her focus is Xero Small Business Insights, a program that uses anonym...

Most builders were never taught marketing. For most of the last decade they did not need to be. Orders came in, the phone rang, and whatever budget existed went to whichever sales rep called first. That market has tightened. New franchises are landing in established patches, buyers are researching harder than they ever have, and the builders who cannot be found are losing work to the ones who can....

Rod Gibbs has had three jobs in construction. He has done almost everything inside them. He started out tiling, switched to carpentry, and served his apprenticeship at Glover Building Group before becoming a partner in the business. Then thirteen years at Plantation, moving from supervisor to construction manager to building manager, running volume at a scale most builders never see. Fifty to sixt...

Phil runs WD Constructions in Melbourne. He started in 2018 with one week of work at a mate's house and a first child on the way. Six years on he has never spent a dollar on advertising. Every job has come through word of mouth. He has also built a serious following on Instagram by showing what most operators keep off camera. The mistakes. The rectification. What sits behind the plasterboard. Az a...

Most builders open an AI tab, type into it like it's Google, close it, and get back the same generic content everyone else is posting. Hard hat emojis. Crane emojis. Transforming spaces, one build at a time. Builders are publishing it, and audiences are picking it straight away. That does not just waste time. It chips away at trust in the brand. The tool is not the problem. The setup is. In this s...

Az runs through the week that was. Every state is quoting a big housing number. Queensland says 100,000 homes. New South Wales says 150,000. Victoria says 300,000 unlocked. South Australia says 50,000. Add them up and they clear the 1.2 million National Housing Accord target. The problem is that none of them are counting the same thing. Victoria's figure is zoning capacity measured out to 2051, an...

Two states. Same data. Same method. Queensland doubled and Victoria did not. That is the headline from the first State of the Land reports, and it is close to the least useful thing in either of them. In this episode Az walks through what is actually inside the Queensland and Victoria editions, section by section, and what to look for when you open them. The reports are built on 26 straight quarte...

Most builders treat a communication breakdown as a people problem. Dan Okart says it is a clarity problem, and it starts at the top. Dan from A Thousand Feet Deep is back with Az for a third Monday in a row. The brief was simple. What does effective communication actually look like inside a building business. The answer went a long way past a five point checklist. Dan opens with the line that fram...

Aaron Applefield has worn nineteen different hats in twenty years at Brett's. Ask him what he does and he reframes the question. His core, he says, is simpler than any job title. He is a coach. In this episode Az sits down with the man they call Apps. Business Development Manager at Brett's. Baseball coach. Mentor with Live Life Build. It is a conversation that runs well past building. They get in...

A big week at The Good Builder. Az runs through three announcements and three headlines moving the residential building industry right now. The announcements first.  The Milwaukee Tools Winter Sucks campaign kicks off, with [20] pieces of heated gear going out over four weeks. Tell TGB why winter sucks and you go in the running. It is a game of skill, so get creative.  Pulse opens to a small group...

Burnout. Staff churn. Chasing defects. A team that only works when you're standing over it. Dan from One Thousand Feet Deep says none of those are the real problem — they're the cracks that show up when a building business has no foundation under it. Dan joins Az as co-host for this one, tackling real questions pulled from past episodes with some of Australia's top builders, Kyle Zanetto (Zanetto...

While the rest of the industry went backwards in FY26, Stroud Homes was the only franchise in our Top 100 report to grow — in both revenue and numbers. So we sat down with James Stroud to work out why. It's not a growth-hack story. James talks about Kaizen, the Toyota-born habit of fixing every small thing that goes wrong, no matter how lame it seems, and why panning a hard client's feedback for t...

Brendan and Hayley Kelly have spent two decades building XP Finishes into one of the Gold Coast's most respected finishing trades — named Trade Business of the Year in 2025 — but as they say themselves, they're only as good as their last job. In this episode, Az sits down with the husband-and-wife team behind XPHQ, their customer-facing design hub, and their new decorative brand Atelier. We get in...

Fewer homes, more money...that's the Queensland building market in one line. In this Monday episode, Az runs through what's just dropped, what's coming, and the one tool he reckons is one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle for any builder. Inside this episode:  • The QLD Top 100 Builder Report (with Australian Construction Data) — why it's a read on the market, not just a ranking. The hundr...

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...