The "Level Up" with Duayne Pearce Podcast

Secrets to Creating a Great Team in the Construction Industry.

• Duayne Pearce • Season 1 • Episode 146

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#146 Having a great team begins with great leadership, requiring strategic planning, delegating effectively, and understanding the true value of both on-site and administrative staff.

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Speaker 1:

At the end of the day, the team is only a reflection of you, so the best way to have a great team is to have a great. You Work on yourself, do self-development, take ownership, accountability, read book, get coaching, because if you're right, everything around you can be right. Okay, guys, welcome back to another episode of level up and, uh, we are back for another cracking solo episode today. So, uh, look, this one is called build a great team.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I get asked really regularly is how do I manage to get so many things done and the like. The only answer I had for that is because of the team that I have around me. One really important thing that I realized pretty early in my business was I can't do everything on my own, so I really just have to make sure everything is getting done. My goal all the time is to make sure that I'm surrounding myself with people that can do the tasks that I need done, and the very important part of that is having a team around you that you trust, and I see it's happened so often now, and even even in my current team. If any team member um, I guess gives you any doubt at all about anything that they do. It can make you very nervous, can give you a little bit of anxiety and ultimately it won't give you the freedom to trust that they're doing what you want done and so you're always going to have in the back of your mind, you're always going to be thinking about are they doing it correctly, are they doing what I've, what I've told them to do, and all those types of things. And so for me, it's it's it's really about, I guess, helping my team grow into a position where I do trust them to do everything, and trust only comes like. I think trust is something in a business that needs to be proven, like employers need to prove that they can be trusted and they can complete tasks accurately, and they can complete tasks all those types of things. So there's so many parts to this. It's a really big one actually, because having a great team isn't just about employing people and taking them for a pub lunch on a Friday or shouting them a few beers every now and then.

Speaker 1:

Look, that will get you a little bit of improvement, a little bit of sort of culture and team building, but ultimately that's not what's going to get you a great team. You need to be like. I'm a big believer that you have to lead by example. There is nothing that I would ask any of my team members to do across all of my businesses that I wouldn't do myself. That's not to say that I know how to do everything. Um, I believe, as a business owner, you need to be the one that's pulling all the strings and guiding people in the right direction. And, as I said before, to have a good team doesn't mean like I don't need to be doing everything, I just need to make sure everything's getting done. So it's about having a little bit of an understanding about everything across the business, and that includes marketing, accounting, finances, contracts, everything and I'm a big believer that you shouldn't just take everyone's word for things. You need to have regular meetings with each member of your team with the marketing team, with the accounts team, with the site teams, all those types of things and oversee everything to make sure that everything's on track.

Speaker 1:

But coming back to how I've managed to get to where I am and do everything that I do, once I realised that I couldn't do everything on my own. I've been quite strategic about who I bring into the business, and it's always Everyone that I bring into the business, like, I guess, to go back a little bit like if you're a trader or a builder we always think that we need to have people on site. We think that smashing out more work, like building the team, getting more tradesmen, getting more apprentices is how we grow our business, and I know from my personal experience now that that's only got a very small part to do with it. To be successful, you actually need to manage the business, and so I learned the hard way. I built up a huge carpentry contract business, had 40 plus carpenters for a long time and I could manage all of them on site across multiple sites. I could make sure they had the correct tools, I could make sure they were doing the work correctly, but it was the administration side of the business that I really lacked, and that is what ultimately held me back from being truly successful back then.

Speaker 1:

Um, like, I ended up with an accountant. I had a bookkeeper, but the administration and all the the behind the scenes management of the business was an absolute shit show and I didn't understand the value of the people that were off site. And, like I said, I was in that trading mindset and I just thought that employees were on site. They're the ones doing the work on site. But um, so a big turning point in my business, in my life and in my wealth has been understanding that the people off-site are just as important as the people on site, and that's across the board. Like I said, marketing, accounting, finances, everything. And so my business really excelled when I realized that value and I put administration first and in my office full time, basically just sitting there taking care of all the administration, following up clients, dealing with selections, helping me do all the pricing, and I saw a big turning point in my business where everything started to get more efficient, I was less stressed and things started to run a lot smoother.

Speaker 1:

But even then, the challenge for me was I didn't, I wasn't understanding, I was still only like, at this point of time, we're still doing contract work and to me, the like, the income was still based on me pricing the site labor, and so that administration time was always getting chewed it like that. That salary was chewing into what I was, um, what I, what I thought I could charge the team out on site. But something I've learned and it's something I focus on there, it's something I do a lot of coaching and mentoring, uh, with people in my other businesses is, to have a successful business, you've got to have the money in the business first, and this is an area where I believe all businesses go wrong. If you don't understand your overheads and your running cost, you are always going to struggle to grow your business because the money to pay the growth of the business, the money to pay new staff members, administration staff, to get an office space, to have a VA, to have a bookkeeper, is just going to slowly keep getting sucked out of your site post, and so it's really, really important to understand your overheads and your running costs and you can actually allow for the offsite cost, basically before you get the work, and that's basically what an overhead is. An overhead is everything that's off-site, and so what's really excelled the growth of my businesses is when we are planning for growth.

Speaker 1:

And we did that same exercise. I've talked about this a lot Shay that sits behind the cameras here and produces all these podcasts and does their marketing stuff. We did the exact same exercise when we made the decision to put Shay on. We reviewed our overheads and at the time we put a small amount of what Shay was going to cost into our overheads that I took a small pay cut to top up the rest of it. And then, as our business progressed and that role gets filled, we kept adjusting our overheads to make sure that Shea's salary was covered, and so you can do that with everybody in your business.

Speaker 1:

So if you figure out you need an administration person or a bookkeeper or a VA, you put that into your overhead costs and when you price the next job it's built into the cost. And this is a really successful way to grow a business because you can confidently make hires, you can confidently go and lease office space and know that the business has the funds coming in to cover that overhead. It's not quite as simple as that. There's far more to it, but that's the basics of it. So you want the money in the business before you make the hire and to me that is how you create a good team and that is how you take the stress away from it. So I guess, to give you an overview of where I'm at now and what I've done over the last 10 years is when, once I realized that it, it just freed me up.

Speaker 1:

So my, my goal as a business, as a business owner of multiple businesses now is, like I said, I don't have to do everything, I just need to make sure everything gets done. So I have strategically placed people in all my businesses to allow me to oversee everything. So with my building business, we've grown, we've adapted our overheads. We now have a construction manager full-time, we have a full-time project manager and we also have my wife full-time in the office, which her title is a project manager as well, and we also have a full time accounts and contracts manager as well. So having those people in those basis, um, it allows our business, to our building business, to run very efficiently. It allows us to run our jobs quite tight schedules. It allows our jobs to be very profitable because there is a strategic person managing every part of the business. And then, obviously, when you get to the site side of things, we've got lead carpenters across our building business. So every, each one of our projects all has a lead carpenter on that site. And then those lead carpenters have carpenters and apprentices and laborers working underneath them and everybody knows their roles and responsibilities and everyone communicates to each other.

Speaker 1:

In my other businesses, like our software business, my, my wife also runs that business. She's just as busy as I am, um, but we have other staff of va in that business and that allows my wife to be able to do multiple roles and do multiple things. The um uh libel, I feel, is exactly the same. Like amelia and I have set that up to have team members that know their role and look after business and Amelia and I can be the face of that business. We can drive development, we can drive growth and we can really focus on making sure that business is hitting targets.

Speaker 1:

So that includes having business plan for the team. Like so many people put a business plan together and it's just all about turnover and how many jobs they want to do and um, those type of things. But they don't necessarily do a business plan and plan for the staff they need, and it's a huge, huge part of being successful in business. You can't just plan for turnover, plan for making profit and plan how many jobs you want to be doing. You need to plan at what, like what's going to be the drivers for you to hire the next person, what's going to be the driver for you to put on a manager to manage a certain part of the business. So all these little things all help you get freedom and ultimately, if you're a business owner, that's what you're doing it for. You want freedom in life. You want to be able to have a business that allows you to to do other things in your life like I can't be, um looking around for developments and looking around for other business opportunities and working through da's for developments and working with joint ventures if I'm just head down, thumb up day to day, flunging my ass out on the tools and trying to run a building business. It doesn't work like that and it never ever will. Um, so look, that's to me.

Speaker 1:

That is what like build a great team means. It means sit down and have a strategic plan, um, work out what you want your turnover to be, work out what you want your growth to be, how many jobs and all those types of things. And but lay out, like number one, lay out the team. Figure out how many team members you need on each project. Figure out how much supervision those team members are going to need, who those who those supervisors are going to be. Like you might be, you might have a team currently that you could be working towards, one of your apprentices becoming a team leader and one of your current control tradesmen becoming a manager or a team leader. So this is all and what generally happens when you start to work on these plans and growth of a business. You can start to have these conversations with your current team and figure out are they team members that do want to work their way up the chain and have higher roles in your business, or do you need to start putting the feelers out?

Speaker 1:

So one area where my businesses all my businesses have been incredibly successful over the last couple of years is I'm always listening. If an opportunity, if someone rings me up and says, hey, a mate of mine or a friend of mine, they're this, this, this, they're looking for a job, I listen, I take it all in and 9 to 10, I'll say, look, give them my, my details, get them to send their resume through and we might have a meeting. And I can honestly sit here and say that in my building business and in live life build in the last three months, I've been able to lean on those conversations and those decisions, go back, look at those resumes, contact those people and call them into my business, which has allowed my businesses to go to the next level. I wouldn't have been able to take my businesses to the level that I have now so quickly, if I didn't, if I wasn't aware that those people were floating around in the universe and possibly looking for a change in direction or a change in job, if I was just dismissing those conversations because I thought I was too busy and I didn't have time to meet people, I didn't have time to read a resume. So never, ever, dismiss someone contacting you for a job. You may not have the role for them right at this point in time, but my advice is always have a conversation with them, talk to them.

Speaker 1:

I call it planting seeds. You hear me talk about it all the time. Plant a seed, let them know your growth strategy. And look, you never know. One thing that I've learned in business is, if you wait enough to the perfect time, well, there is no perfect timing. If you say to someone, look, I can't do it right now, I need to do this, I need to get a, I need to get more work, I need to get more jobs, I need to get more money, those people will be long gone. But if you change your conversation to say, oh look, um, I'm actually planning on putting on a construction manager, um, it's, it's part of our growth plans for the next 12 months or two years. Um, we've actually got a lot of work in the pipeline. Like I'm pretty confident I'm going to be able to employ that person in two months, three months, six months time.

Speaker 1:

And I've had plenty of those conversations where the person said, oh, look well, look, I really love your business, I love everything you talk about. Is there a job? Like, would you have a role for me now? Like, maybe as a lead carver or a carver, and then we can work our way up to that. You can see how I go over the next six months and, yeah, maybe I can work my way into that position. I'm like, yeah, look, if that's a possibility, then yeah, let's sit down and have a further conversation about it.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, one bit of advice there is don't be quick to dismiss when opportunities get put in front of you, because, look, I'm a wiggly person. I believe in the universe throws things at you for all sorts of reasons. So if the universe is throwing those possibilities at you, then take advantage of them. Always dig deeper, find out more information and go from there. But look, number one rule is you cannot run a business on your own, and to be able to run a successful business, you need to have a great team and at the end of the day, the team is only a reflection of you. So the best way to have a great team is to have a great. You Work on yourself, do self-development, take ownership, accountability. Read Bob Skepp coaching, because if you're right, everything around you can be right.

Speaker 2:

Are you ready to build smarter, live better and enjoy life? Then head over to livelikebuildcom. Forward, slash, elevate to get started. Everything discussed during the Level Up podcast with me Dwayne Pearce, is based solely on my own personal experiences and those experiences of my guests. The information, opinions and recommendations presented in this podcast are for general information only, and any reliance on the information provided in this podcast is done at your own risk. We recommend that you obtain your own professional advice in respect to the topics discussed during this podcast.