Local Wagga Wagga builder John Heffernan has been building homes in Wagga for over 20 years. Already a successful business owner, John brings with him a formidable team of trades and a proven track record of high-quality work. After joining the Stroud Homes family over 3 years ago, John explains how it has changed the way he does business and the advantages of being a part of a reputable and well-managed building franchise.
Transcript:
John from Wagga. I own the Wagga franchise and surrounding areas. I’ve been in the building and construction industry now for over 20 years, doing all different levels of carpentry and construction work, anything from your minor deck work to extensions and renovations. I had my business and I was trading for a lot of years, and it come to a point where I needed to get off the tools and try something different. I had the knowledge, I still enjoy construction, I still enjoy the industry, I enjoy meeting new people.
And we found this online and we thought we’d give it a go, and it all happened very quickly. I had James in Wagga two days later. The business model was good. We use three different types of systems. We use a quoting system, we use an estimating system, and we use an on-site management system. So when you adhere to those three systems, really, there’s nothing that can go wrong. As part of the staff in head office, there is a fully qualified accountant who was employed by James, and he regularly oversees and checks all the local offices, and that’s one thing I do like because he can see at a distance how things are tracking.
We’re builders, we’re not too good with numbers, so we’re not accountants, so it’s great that we’ve got a full-time accountant looking over us. When we first started three and a half years ago, my wife and I started this together. We did everything from council documentation, plans, drafting, design, colours. Now, in three and a half years, we’ve grown to have a full-time estimator, full-time supervisor, full-time office manager, and accounts manager.
Here at Stroud, we use a mobile app called Voxer. When we sign up a new client, we’ll start a chat, and on that chat there will be our estimator, our supervisor, contracts admin, myself, were all on the same chat. And what we do is, when the supervisor goes out on site and he can take a photo or a video and upload it to Voxer, everybody on that chat gets the same video, same photo simultaneously, and it’s a really great way of communicating between our office, our staff outside, meaning our supervisor, and the client, and it’s just a really good communication tool.
If we can’t find a solution by asking everybody in the group, we’ve got builders ranging from 25 to 65 with their broad range of experience and time in the industry. If somebody doesn’t know about it, it’s not worth knowing. When I had my previous business, I used to spend two to three nights every week out of town, which wasn’t fantastic because we had a new baby on the way and I didn’t get to sort of spend much time at home. But now, having a Stroud franchise, I’m in town all the time, I come home every night, which is great.
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