My background starts back in high school doing a school-based apprenticeship with my dad as a carpenter. I didn’t end up finishing school, ended up deciding to go down the trade route which I know it seems to be what I’ve always wanted to do, and what I’m happiest doing and see myself doing for the foreseeable future. Once I’d finished my apprenticeship, I sort of branched out and started to work as a contractor with different companies, different firms, doing different projects and different styles, I guess, of construction work in the earlier days.
About six years ago now myself and Greg, my dad, we were just working together. Greg sort of wanted to look at the avenue of scaling up the business to some degree, but we didn’t have the slightest clue really which route to take. That’s when through one avenue of advertising, we saw the Stroud Homes brand looking for new franchisees in just about every area because they were only in Boonah at that point. Started having the meetings with James. And speaking with James, he’s very passionate about what he wanted to do, what he wanted to achieve, which is definitely the first thing that engaged us or still engages everyone.
Being a smaller operator, you know, generally, we would operate off small computer programs or just even an Excel spreadsheet back in the day kind of thing. And then, James would be there showing us through, you know, some of the newer programs, and how they operate, how they mesh together, these are the systems that we need in place. We didn’t really know that they existed, but now we do, and we want to get involved with them. Definitely made us become better communicators throughout whatever we are doing.
Currently, we’re working at about two houses per month. We’re definitely trying to scale that up with getting the right people into our business, which is something that we have struggled with. But definitely, with the help of head office, we’ve become better recruiters, and know that for us to have a good team what each team member needs to bring to the party. Currently, we’re working on a strategy for myself to be taking over the business from my dad, and he’s keen to kick back with mojitos and horses.
Without the Stroud Homes vehicle, I doubt he would have been able to do that as early as he wanted to. And now, myself and my partner, we’ll be getting more hands-on with the business, take it to much higher levels and really get some good results from Stroud homes.