The Good Builder Podcast

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 Industries, and working with Crimsafe Group before joining the twenty five year old family business behind Goop Guys.

Az sits down with Mark to talk about:

- What it actually means to protect...

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 how a home flows before it's built.

Second, live chat monitoring, actually staffed rather than left switched on and ignored.

Third, lead magnets, giving something of val...

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 constructed in Australia, and why the street he grew up on in regional Victoria ended up on the sign.

Covered in this...

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 for women. The Census question about unpaid hours at home and what it made everyone sit with. Why...

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. Three messages and a calendar invite the night you meet, and what that intensity says about their order book.

The fluff. Product market...

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 Metricon and Simonds. Ten metres of fall is not. Josh set out to be the volume builder for difficult builds, and now the competition sends those clients his way.

He takes...

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 anonymised and aggregated data from the Xero platform to show what is actually happening inside small businesses. Real sales, jobs and wages figures rather than survey responses. The Australian data set covers more than half a million small...

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.

This is episode one of the Monday Marketing series. Az sits down with Paul from Viva Digital, an agency the industry does not hear much about...

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 sixty slabs a month. Fifty to sixty handovers. Supervisors carrying fourteen to sixteen jobs at a time.

He has just been appointed General Manager of Construction at Bold, and he unpacks the move...

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 asks him why he spoke up about prefab, and what the public is actually being sold when a home gets promised in a month...

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 solo episode, Az walks through a one time setup that takes ten to fifteen minutes and improves everything the tool...

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, and nobody has proposed those homes yet. New South Wales is counting projects handed a faster assessment pathway, which is permission to apply, not permission to build. Queensland is counting land where water, sewer and...

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 quarters of real lot sales inside active estates. Not building approvals. Not median house prices. Every release and every unsold lot is counted and sorted by frontage...

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 frames the whole conversation. The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

From there...

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 into stoicism and the daily practice of it. Kaizen, and why direction matters more than the size of your steps. Reframing anxiety as excitement...

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 of builders. It is a customer experience program that surveys your build clients at key stages, then hands the data back to you. Because mo...

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 Builders), Tony Gall (Creation Homes), James Stroud (Stroud Homes) and Peter Wood (Avid Property Group).

What's covered:
 • The first cracks that appear when you're working in the b...

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 that one fleck of gold beats getting your feelings hurt. We get into defects and why he's anti-handyman, checklists over memory (the way pilots are le...

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 into why the finishing trade makes or breaks a home, the real cost of cutting corners (what Brendan calls the "FAFO tax"), and the science behind specialty finishes like lime wash and Fren...

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 hundred biggest QLD builders wrote ~6% fewer homes but banked ~5% more, with average contracts up 11.5% to $540k. Plus three ways to actually use the report: benchmark yourself, price your next job...

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 sits down with host Az to walk through what he has seen. Timber frames delivered to site and made weather tight in two days...

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 changes when you start building in systems instead.

At the centre is Truss House, Pryda's framing system that turns the structural shell of a home, the roof...

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 goes well past a league table. It is an intelligence report.

The line for the year: fewer homes, more money. Queensland's hundred biggest builders...

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 good job. It is protecting margin on every job. And most of that protection happens before a contract is signed.

In this episode, Owen breaks down:

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? Quality of work. What do customers actually say? Communication. That gap sits at the centre of this episode.

Az is joined by Drew and Sean from Increase Construction to talk about where AI...

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 matter. The record $119 billion Queensland budget and the Residential Activation Fund doubled to $1 billion. The $5.2 billion NSW bet on Western Sydney water and prefab. And the apprenticeship numbers that look strong...

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 decision, every holiday booked around which hotel had the best Wi-Fi. He wanted systems that would set him free.

Three and a half...

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 from the start, not handed a finished set of drawings and asked to price them.

Vicky makes the case against tendering and for...

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 that only you can do?

They get into the difference between chasing symptoms and finding the root cause...

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 College before founding Dedicated Staffing Solutions. She knows a building business from the inside.

The throughline of this one is simple. Your people are your most...

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 extensions, across residential and commercial work in South East Queensland. Fifteen staff. A 4.9-star rating from 70 reviews. And more than a decade in business, in an industry where most do...

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 went on through the year are starting to come back off. Josh shares what he is seeing across builders around Australia, why suppliers have...

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 your business alive, not bury it.

Chris explains the difference between insolvency, liquidation, and bankruptcy in plain terms. He walks through...

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 Home Movement off the ground, and co-founded EcoPanel, a prefabricated wall system that can get a house closed in inside a week.

This one covers a lot of ground that lands the same...

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 happen. At the time of recording there were more than 1,600 price drops across Queensland alone.

From there the conversation opens up. Why homes under one...

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.

The reason isn't that AI can't do anything. It's that building is rarely black and white. Every job is different. Every client is different...

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 makes this conversation different.

In this episode, Luke sits down with Aaron to talk about the road that led him to start Prime Build Recruitment. It was not...

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 shortage, the affordability problem, and the contradictions that builders and buyers are about to face. It is a calm, honest look at a very...

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 company that earned some of the best feedback the TGA has ever given a first-time facility. He's one of those rare operators who thinks like a CEO and works like a tradesman.<...

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's ever attended. What follows is a conversation about how the industry actually moves forward — not through hype, but through relationships, knowledge sharing, and builders getting closer to the people who make their product.

...