Brendan Moylan: I’ve been in the industry for almost 20 years. I’m a carpenter by trade. I’ve been a site manager for 10 years. And for the last three, I’ve been doing renovations and extensions, semi on the tools.
I engaged a partner, who I’d worked with as a site manager. And together, we started growing a business. And we realised the obstacles to get from where we were to where we wanted to be were too great to not have the backing of people who know what they’re doing because it was going to take a significant investment to lift my business to where I wanted it to be. And the backing of a franchise gave me the confidence to make that investment.
We sat down with numerous other franchises and several times, so we did quite a lot of diligence. Really, as silly as that sounds, we came to a gut feeling, and the moment I read the Stroud mission, vision, and ethics, I thought that above everything if I’m going to give my all I want to be with a company who has the same values as I do, and I really believe that Stroud lines up as a person with me. So, if they would line up as a person with me, then I was going to able to reflect the business that I wanted and that they want. Another reason I chose Stroud is because there’s great support within the network, builder-to-builder. We can lean on all the other guys, and we have regularly. I also believe that the Stroud guys have more skin in the game and more care for their franchisees.
Since joining Stroud, I have gotten completely off the tools. And I’ve learned so much about the back-end of building including marketing, sales, estimating. And I really enjoy driving to work each day, because there’s a new challenge every day and there’s something new to learn, and I really like speaking to customers.
In the future, I’d like to be more in a managing role and less in hands-on with every task but still with a great idea of what’s happening in the company every day.