Level Up with Duayne Pearce
I take on the role of an authoritative voice that fearlessly communicates truths drawn directly from my lived experiences. With a genuine sense of ownership, my insights are free from any hidden agendas – they truly belong to the audience. My stories and journey add remarkable value, the key now lies in harnessing its power effectively to help others.
My purpose is to create a new residential building industry. My mission is to inspire unshakable self-confidence in my colleagues in the industry, empowering them to orchestrate prosperous, enduring, and lucrative businesses that bring exceptional projects to fruition for our clients.
My goal is to foster a deeper comprehension among clients about the identity and functions of builders, redefining their perceptions.
Level Up with Duayne Pearce
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Join us as we sit down with Jerry Tyrrell from Tools App, who offers a compelling insight into how digital innovation is revolutionizing Australian construction. Jerry shares his passion for empowering builders by providing easy access to crucial knowledge, which could position Australia as a global leader in the building Industry.
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Mistakes, rework and ignorance are costing Australia at least $50 billion a year.
Speaker 2:I know there's a lot of builders out there that when they get into those situations where they're chasing their tail and they need money, they just start cutting corners, they start substituting materials.
Speaker 1:I believe that the tools offers the pathway to the compliance that we need to know. Plus we stitch in best practice.
Speaker 2:Where has this been for the last 20 years of my career? G'day guys. Welcome back to another episode of Level Up. We're taking advantage of our time down in Sydney to bring you another cracking episode this afternoon. So the next guest we have for you is absolutely, I think, an incredible human being. I know a little bit about him but we're gonna find out a lot more over the next hour or so. But I believe they have developed one of the best tools that the construction industry has ever seen, and as soon as I got sent it and I seen it, it was a no brainer for me and I had to jump on board with it. So massive warm welcome to Jerry Terrell from Tools App. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm fine, dwayne, thank you for your kind words, but it's the product that matters, and the product contains so much of the song line of good building, and we'll talk about that.
Speaker 2:Mate, this podcast could go a lot of different directions. Like we've just been chatting for 10, 15 minutes and you just blow me away. We've just been talking about how my schooling experience Maybe we can touch on that for a minute because I think it ties in like my schooling experience is why I jumped on your app. Because, like I was just saying to you, like I, I didn't like school. I sat at the back, I played up, I paid no attention because it just it did not interest me at all. And then, um, even through my apprenticeship, and then getting my builder's license, like that schooling part of it almost stopped me from following my dream because I wasn't interested in I don't know that way of learning or sitting in the classroom. I'm not sure what it is. You can explain it better than I can.
Speaker 1:I think it's unfair and I think it's discriminatory. And today there will be maybe 400,000 or 500,000 children that are treated shabbily. I don't think it's intentional, but they don't realize that some of us. I put things in patterns, I line things up. I'm mathematically okay and I was all right about maybe not understanding some things which were irrelevant to me, but I still stayed with the classroom. I want that to change. I want building and trade skills and practical skills to be seen as good as anything else. In fact, I don't really want to have any stratification. If you love what you're doing and you want to learn about it, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so through my building career I've taken building codes and standards very seriously. But to find out information and Jerry's got some copies of them here these massive books that you find one bit in one section and that you have to, you find one bit in one section and then you have to go to another section to find something else and, depending on the class of building, like there's different books you've got to be looking at so and so I didn't. I probably didn't take enough notice of the building codes to what I probably should have been, and then, like when I seen your app, I was like where has this been for the last 20 years of my career?
Speaker 1:They should have taught you and I on how to find things and how to deal with wordy documents. I'll just shout out to the ABCB their goal to provide a national building standard was phenomenal. I condemn the way it's been delivered. I condemn how inaccessible it is. I condemn its structure and its contents. I can condemn the number of volumes, but it's particularly well intentioned I. I look. It befuddles me and anybody, and I'm not arrogant at all. It befuddles me at times.
Speaker 2:Finding information, it's hard it's hard and I guess, before we go too much further, this one um like, obviously we're talking about our own experience, so this is our own opinions, our own experience, so everyone needs to go and do their own homework on those types of things. But yeah, I think there's something very exciting about the way you're doing this, and I'm even more interested to find out why yourself and your investors like you've currently put in well over $10 million to get an app that's hopefully going to well. I believe it will revolutionize the industry.
Speaker 1:For everybody who's got it. I think they're finding that it is the best asset and ironically, it's in fact that as the use decreases, but you're sharing it more and opening it up to help others with it. If you don't need it so much, it means that you've learned those critical measurements and it's not as necessary. But in my opinion, there's no substitute to knowledge and I believe that the tools offers the pathway to the compliance that we need to know. Plus, we stitch in best practice, we integrate.
Speaker 2:So sorry to cut you off, jerry. So just what is? Can you just for the listeners, before we get right in too far into it like what is Tools App? Like what's it? What's your aim? Why have you done it? What is it?
Speaker 1:My aim is to provide, in fact, the world, but initially, australia is our test. So my primary aim is I would like Australia to be the best builders in the world and the most productive. It's going to be difficult the latter, but I believe we can be the best builders in the world using knowledge and getting back to craft. So the other objective well, to achieve that, the how on that is giving all of us access to the knowledge we want at the end of our life or at the end of a court case, or at the end of some horrible mistake. I want to give them the knowledge as early as possible, and TAFE and the universities are coming on board and they will help deliver knowledge when we're being taught.
Speaker 2:So you've used some words when we've had some conversations before. But tools is like is it picturising? It's putting their standards in visualising.
Speaker 1:It's illustrating compliance best practice. Compliance is a combination of NCC documentation and the reference documents, some of which are standards, and sometimes it may refer to NASH and some of their publications, and the reference documents, some of which are standards and sometimes it may refer to Nash and some of their publications, and the technical information. There's a lot of information in the law of LORE of building, the craft of building, so we try to stitch that in as well. We say it's not mandatory to do but it's quite often we don't know about that Like a wash on stairs, a slope on a parapet, all of those sort of things we try to stitch in. And then we try to colour code things and make it easy to understand and all on one page and zoomable.
Speaker 2:Look from what I've seen of it so far, it's incredible, and I love your emails you keep sending through your updates and you're always adding stuff to it. But I just love how easy and simple it is to use, like we've only had it for a little while. Um, I was like I was just saying to you some of my supervisors using it quite regularly. Now I'm looking at it when I'm doing proposals for jobs to see if there's anything I've missed or need to allow like we've. We are struggling a little bit to get our lead carpenters, um, on site on board with it, but I think that's that's more back to me to make sure they understand that their time standing there looking at an app and getting the correct information is more important to me than just being head down bum up all day.
Speaker 1:So, um, and it's also getting us ready so that when we were either apprentices or students or that we need to be taught to stop, stop and find the the information, never guess anything, um and also understand how to find it.
Speaker 1:Tools offers about a 10 to 12 second pathway so you can search visually, so it's very graphic, you can search by voice and you can search by typing in, so you can find that information pretty quickly. I'm not saying I think it's really easy, but then I've created it and I probably knew a lot of the stuff that is in there. We do need to make sure that the 1.4 million Australians who need this spend a bit of time, because it's a go Well compared to the time that I spent on this, it's probably a thousandth of the time I spent delving into the NCC and not finding the answers I need or being confused. But if you do bother to really get to know and I've had an architect in Western Australia say he nerded through for 10 hours you may not need to do that. But most of you, if you can spend time, it's time well spent yeah, I just while we've been talking.
Speaker 2:So I actually got sent the app by sean, the tassie builders blog. So here when we went to we went to tasmania earlier in the year to record a podcast we finished recording his podcast and he said hey, have you? Have you seen this? He'd been sending a couple of days. How did?
Speaker 1:he find it.
Speaker 2:It's so good and yeah, straight away he sent me your I think it's your daughter's details and yeah, that's how this all happened.
Speaker 1:And hopefully it's merit, because the reason why I was very, very attentive to the knowledge that I got from tradesmen were they knew a lot, they did a fantastic job, it's trouble-free, it's still standing well, you know, five decades on, and so I'm hoping the tools I mean the reason why you've persisted with it is it answers your current question and it goes deep those EDMs that come out each week. They're little, tiny micro learning modules, believe it or not. Stairs came out today, maintenance stairs, and I didn't know about the 600 minimum rule for a landing for maintenance stairs. So these are all the sort of little things that we get each week. Can we tell?
Speaker 2:our listeners a bit of background Sure, like how did you get to this? Because everyone's going to be wondering well, he's doing all this. Why is he doing it?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I've had a charmed life. I mean, I certainly wasn't from a wealthy family, but I really enjoyed my life. I was treated well and I suppose I want people to have a really joyful experience and I've really loved my career. I always knew I'd be an architect from age 12. I started working as a tradesman when I was 17, digging ditches and sorry, in fact a laborer digging ditches, and I was just curious and they were so tolerant and nice to me so I've just learned along the way.
Speaker 1:I was always the person who wanted to know how to do things wet the bricks down, put the barrow in the right direction, store timber properly outside on gluts. You know, cover the timber, cover the dress timber, understand the grain joiners. Craftsmen would tell me so much and I would just be just sucking that in. So I'm and I'm not arrogant about this, but most people who know me know that I'm a handy tradesman in most trades. I wouldn't be up to you as an apprenticed carpenter, but I would know most things and I certainly know about arousing doors, backing off doors and I would probably have been telling all craftsmen paint the bottom of your doors, never embed your joinery into tiles, all those things which we should be doing now routine well, that's the other thing I loved about your app, because there's a lot of best practice things in there and yet, look, they're not standard but they're absolute no-brainer, common sense thing thing.
Speaker 2:And the reason I laugh then is because your comment on making sure the wheelbarrow is facing the same way it's all those little things that people don't think of, but they're those little things that create huge inefficiencies and throughout a whole day, can and danger and danger, but can. So for people that maybe don't get what we're talking about there, if you're landscaping, bricklaying, blocklaying, moving materials around a site where you place your wheelbarrow, if you push it into a pile of dirt and then load it up and then you have to turn it around while it's full, is a lot more inefficient than if you take it to the pile of dirt, turn it around in the direction you want to leave when it's full and then load it up. It's a no-brainer, it should be common sense, it should be common sense.
Speaker 1:So one of the things we'll be doing with tools and we're digressing, but we will be trying to make sure that people can see common sense roadmaps, drainage, substrates, cleaning all those skills we learn from our mothers and grandmothers sometimes our fathers about preparing surfaces correctly and understanding the new craft is science, for understanding the new craft is science For us to understand surface texture, chemical composition, dry time, cure. There's nothing wrong with us and ideally our mentors tell us, but also, every now and then we've got to look at the back of the package and read it carefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just massive now and it's as simple as following instructions. Like I'd like to get your opinion on this, jerry. Like I believe that a lot of the issues that we have, and possibly the reason we're talking about some of the things we're going to talk about today, is because our industry has created this culture of racing to the bottom and people feel that they have to be the cheapest price, to stay busy all the time and make money.
Speaker 2:But reality is that, like I tell my clients all the time, like, because there's this sort of, I'm from Brisbane, like most of our work's inner city Brisbane, and I hear so many people say, oh, dps construction's an expensive builder. Or like we have friends and family that say, oh, we can't afford to build with you. And I say you can't afford not to Like, we are not expensive, we do things correctly.
Speaker 1:So and you've got some numbers on what defective work is costing us. I just don't want to be seen as negative because I'm very positive about the future, but mistakes, rework and ignorance are costing Australia at least $50 billion a year in direct losses. Rework, lack of productivity, carbon cost Insurance alone across Australia is gouging three to four billion dollars. That goes into commercial shareholders' pockets. Nothing goes back. We don't even have a body that tells us precisely what's going wrong and why it's going wrong, so it's just ridiculous. The thing I'm saying to everybody is do it well the first time, and that is so much cheaper than the alternative that we're facing now, and that on the watch of all the leaders in the industry. The problems are still persisting.
Speaker 2:Well, look, hopefully some government people or industry bodies listen to this podcast and we can give them a bit of a shake up. But like, again back to the cost things, like it's so ingrained, like I don't even know through my apprenticeship, like my boss being on the phone and like I could hear him on the phone dropping, lowering his price to win a job. And I know, when I started doing my business, there was plenty of meetings that I'd be at and I didn't know how to run my business. So like To stand your ground on price. No, I would drop my price, like a client or an architect would say, oh you know, like if you come down $20,000, we'll sign the contract and you don't understand what it's taking to run your business.
Speaker 2:And you think you're making money and it gets worse the bigger the numbers. So when you start doing $1 million homes or $2 million homes and in your mind you think that you're making 10%, but you don't understand that it's actually taking you 18% or 22% to run your business, and so you think, oh, it's a million-dollar job, I'm making 10%. That's $100,000. I'm sitting at a meeting. Oh, if I drop at 20, I've got the job. I need the money.
Speaker 1:And then it rains. I need the cash flow?
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Okay, so if we drop 20, we've got the job? Yeah, all right, let's sign the contract. And then you're chasing your tail from day one, and so I used to cost myself more money because I would not leave a job until it was perfect. But I know there's a lot of builders out there that when they get into those situations where they're chasing their tail and they need money, they just start cutting corners, they start substituting materials and they get the job finished and whatever, six months, two years, five years later, the client's ringing because there's something wrong with waterproofing, or retaining wall never got waterproofed, or whatever the story is, and they blame the client, they blame the architect, they blame all these things, but in reality it was them taking on the job, not costing it correctly and cutting corners that they should never have taken. Yeah yeah. It's incredible how our industry just runs like that and everyone thinks that they get themselves in this trouble with their cash flow, so they just keep digging themselves a deep hole.
Speaker 1:Well, I agree and I think that this is some of the lessons I'm learning from you is that the building knowledge, the business knowledge, is only a very small portion of what we're taught. They're approaching that a little bit, so you can have professional skills, but you need to know what you don't know and quite often you may not be good at the business skills needed.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, we know now from all the work I do with my training business Live Like Build, over 80% of the tasks it takes to run a successful business are offsite Wow. So all your administration, your quoting and estimating, your job management, your scheduling, and so if you're a passionate tradesman and your focus is the onsite stuff, it's not hard to see why so many trades businesses get themselves into trouble.
Speaker 1:So a shout out to the business skills within and, can I say, about partnerships and teamwork too, because the bigger you get, the more you need to put good people around you who have different skills. I'm lucky enough to have a twin brother who's an accountant and a lawyer, so we were able to navigate lots of things. But if you haven't got a twin brother, then ideally getting good skills, understanding you'll probably recognize. You probably advise myob or zero um. A lot of people use those docos because it's a fast track to very good quality accounting practices and having a mentor who sets?
Speaker 1:up your businesses and your trusts and your accounts, yeah, properly when you 23, not trying to retrofit something back when you're 43.
Speaker 2:So sorry, we went off track a bit there. So back to your labouring. You went from labouring, so you're a qualified architect.
Speaker 1:So during university I must have been a boring person, but I was either working, playing sport or studying. So in those days you got two degrees you got a science, a bachelor of science, and then you got a bachelor of architecture. So I was a reasonably competent tradesman in most things by the end of that six-year period. We then bought three terraces in inner city, sydney when I was 23. And we rolled them over in four months, each made some money, sold all three and then we moved on to other assets and my twin brother and I have probably done 80 side hustles since then.
Speaker 2:So I was on site all the time. Yeah, so you're very passionate, You're very involved. This isn't just Because one thing I see all the time in this industry is people that come in and create softwares and things and they've actually never worked in it. They just think they're solving problems. But you've been in the trenches, you know what's behind all these things and I assume you built tools because you're passionate about it and you want to make it easier for everyone else that's coming through the industry.
Speaker 1:Well, we know about artificial intelligence I'll call it DI that when you're on site, it's Dwayne intelligence. You probably don't need to go to tools, or if you do, it's a bloody good reason. You're looking at accessibility geometry. You're looking at the width of a car space. You're looking at a thickness of a pavement. You're just double-checking things before the concreter finishes things off, but most of the time there isn't a Dwayne in the background. There isn the time there isn't a dwayne in the background, there isn't a jerry, there isn't an exceptional craftsman tools. Is that exceptional craftsman?
Speaker 1:And I'd like to think it is quite granular and I I haven't had a war with many of my colleagues, but I've said I wanted to illustrate exactly what happens and I want to highlight the high risk items, which is why we often use red and colors and all of our key dimensions that are ISO certified are in red and it's got a citation number.
Speaker 1:If you do want to go back and double check where it is in this document, you can do that. So you know, it's essentially what I would want, which you might think is very selfish, but in providing me with what I want, it's probably what most of us need to deliver the bulkhead, the recess, the joints In that $50 billion that it's costing Australia, under the watch of all of the leaders and all the governments and everybody who thinks they're important. That's not taking into account the stress of a defect claim on the person who did it, the person who didn't intend to do it, the suppliers that don't back them up, and then the emotional strain and the mental health issues of people who haven't made money from a job but because of a mistake they never wanted to make yeah, but your like your app just makes it very simple.
Speaker 2:Easy, like you can literally have it in your pocket. That's what I love about it. Like. So we've got multiple like iPads in our business. Everybody's got a phone these days, so there's literally no excuse not to know what the standard is.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm hoping that it becomes the go-to, because we're in a digital world and initially my team and it's still platform now, so you can go on your laptop. If you're a designer or you're a specifier or you're a consultant, you can double-check it on your laptop.
Speaker 2:But the.
Speaker 1:MIP, the most important person, the person doing the work. It was me as an apprentice and as a labourer, as a tradesman. And then and that's my dog in the background Ralph, and he's chasing his tail which no doubt you might want to catch a cameo off, but that's what the builders are doing. They're chasing their tail. Often they're essentially blowing leaves off their lawn at the beginning of autumn.
Speaker 2:Oh man, it's just dumb stuff. We might have a camera go over instead of just, oh, it's such a mistake.
Speaker 1:No, so um, tools. Tools is a really simple way to get access to the compliant knowledge.
Speaker 2:So, look, I'm really keen to dig more into. Like. A lot of tradies out there will just think that I'm doing all right now, like I've always done it this way, like what's the difference? And like to me it's worth getting access to something like your app and just flicking through it and then if there is things on there that you aren't quite doing right, like it's not that you've done anything bad, it's just you don't know what you don't know. So now's the time to improve your game and start doing things the way you should be doing them.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm with you. So, for all the practitioners out there, including the designers and the certifiers and all the people sitting on top of the person doing it, if you're reluctant about learning and learning the craft of building, then tools isn't for you. But if you want to reinforce the fact with somebody who's not putting a fall in your substrate which I've always done, so now they are requiring falls in substrates. And if you're not making sure that there is an overflow that's lower than the back of the box gutter or lower than the hob in your roof or lower than your threshold, you need to get used to those basic craft 101 building rules, common sense, it's common sense.
Speaker 1:Now you see that. So if you're a person who, sadly, has been taught by the process building industry, which is you go in it's, you know whatever you do is okay, it doesn't matter Then you're going to have to wake up Somebody. You're going to preferably self-manage yourself and slap yourself and say I need to change this because it's not the way craftsmen build. But otherwise you get so much information from tools in one of the 300 tools that are there, with the backup information that allows you to see exactly how a craftsman would do it.
Speaker 2:So how does the tools app? Have you basically just illustrated all the standards Like? Are they aligned? Like or is it your like? I'm just trying to get my head around the structure. Yeah, like. So have you spoken to the like? Does it interact? Like I'm not.
Speaker 1:Well, there are a couple of stories here, okay. So what we've tried to do is we've taken a risk approach. Now I've said to the ABCB, who's the governing body for this, that they should always have structured this on risk and there should have been a single volume and it should have told you about all those things we're talking about common sense, drainage, all the principles, movement, different materials, and then give you the granular information about specifics, balustrades, flaws, whatever. That didn't happen. The NCC refers to reference documents, but it only sends you off in one lane. So if it sends you off to wet area, that's all it sends you off to, whereas in fact it should be waterproofing as a general principle, because waterproofing applies to interior, exterior. It's the same principles, except that one is an outside item.
Speaker 2:And then on top of so, on top of all the information, so you've taken all the information from the ncc and illustrated it in, because each of your illustrations demonstrates a lot of things and I like personally, I love how you can just look at one illustration. It tells you minimum cover, minimum fall.
Speaker 2:Like there's a lot of minimum resistance a door swing that might interfere with a handrail but it's very like it's, it's all there, like it, like you actually have measurements on the drawings. You're not trying, you don't. You're not reading through a code that says, oh, in this situation, you need this much above a hard surface, or but, if it's this situation, you need this much. Like your illustration in two dimensions black and white. Yeah, clearly demonstrates it. And then, on top of that, you need this much Like your illustration In two dimensions black and white. Yeah, clearly demonstrates it. And then, on top of that, you've added your best practice solutions.
Speaker 1:Look, I have a lot of respect to the people who often gave their free time to Australian Standards and the governing bodies that write the reference documents, so that's really great. Now I have chaired one standard, sat on three more, written a standards handbook, and they were very kind to give me an innovation award for a proof of concept about what I wanted them to do themselves In 2018, they were kind enough to give me an innovation, but they were unwilling to consider the best practice information that I believe standards needed to include, and it was just like trying to push a bulldozer single-handed to get things done efficiently. So that's why we've done it collaboratively with the whole. Ingredients from all these important publications are now all embedded in a three-dimensional image with references back to the various sources, which we call citations.
Speaker 2:Again, I just can't explain how awesome it is, and also the fact that you've taken it upon yourself, so your brother's involved in this as well, is he?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got a team we call them the wolves, the wolf pack, yeah and it's boys and girls, and so we just howling at the moon a little bit, but there's a lot of energy, what we call the unsupervised brilliance that I've experienced with both Peter, my building mate, and Tim, my twin brother. We've now got a really great digital guy. We've got a CAD guy who is just, you know, those people that just see what you see and then make it better because they contribute. Yeah, we've got just some really good people blending together to make tools work. And we've got a lot of offshore.
Speaker 2:We've got some offshore people some architects in the philippines, digital people in vietnam, um, you know, people in different regions I think it's incredible, mate, because I know, I know it's like like my wife and I I think I've briefly spoken about like we. We built a software which was started as quotes back and it's now grown into QuoteEase, and like we invested over a million dollars into that before we launched it. That business, like is on track to make money in the next couple of years, but like, people don't realize the money that can get invested in some of these startup ideas and businesses Like you're over 10 million.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I'm just fascinated because sometimes I feel alone and recently I felt a little bit resentful because I've been thinking why didn't the government do this? Why didn't the associations? When I hear you say because quoting effectively and ideally, stitching between what you're quoting and the best practice, information and being able to do it efficiently and having the paperwork behind your quotes so that nobody can litigate against you, it's a really difficult thing to do, so shout out to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a hole that we believe we've created the best software in the industry. So we don't call them quotes anymore, we call them proposals. But yeah, people don't realize what goes in. We put over $300,000 into that and it needed more, so that we then sold our family home to do that. And then we went and rented for a little bit and then we got some investors that come in and, yeah, between us and the investors it's well over a million dollars now into that business.
Speaker 1:Well, here's my promise If the industry resets itself because of good leadership. So I'm really hoping. I'm really hoping that the leaders will step up and they'll say enough's enough On our watch, this is happening. Let's make the changes that are overdue. But we've attacked specification, because specification is just a name for the list of documents that are used to construct. So we've now got-.
Speaker 2:We've got Jerry's dog in the background doing circus tricks.
Speaker 1:My youngest son, who's seven years old, is hairy and a redhead and he just chases his tail sometimes because he's been in the car on building sites for the last three days. So let's have a look at that that if we solve the quality crisis. So the quality crisis is deep, but I'm going to say that there are a lot of things to deal with. So your species relates sorry, quote. Quote is. Quote is relates to specifications. Also relates to contracts. Contracts are like this they're cumbersome, they need to be reworked. I know that the builder commission is trying to do a little bit with the acts, but that's just in new south wales. We need to attack all these things which are stopping builders from either understanding what they need to do and making money. Oh, 100%, definitely.
Speaker 2:And this, like your app is going to help people do that, like it's going to make more money because it's simplifying everything.
Speaker 1:I think it's an important point, I think access to knowledge and access to information. I think it's really seminal to it. Sometimes it's really quite frustrating because I look at people and say, well, why would I look? And I'm thinking, hang on. I mean, besides the fact I've got a thousand people who have gone pro and are paying money to look at this, including some really big dogs, that's flattering. But then every now and then you get somebody who says, oh look, I wouldn't even bother. And I'm thinking, is that in their personality? Is that an industry-wide problem? Is that the fact that we haven't broken through?
Speaker 2:I look it's hard, jerry, because I this whole podcast is about creating a new building industry, like sharing stories, getting information in front of people, getting getting guests in front of an audience that um can tell stories about their career, about their experience, about their products, um. But everything is aimed at creating a new building industry and what I mean by that is creating an industry where everyone runs successful, sustainable and profitable businesses. And it's it's so like it's easy for me to sit here and talk about all this now, but I it took me 10 or 12 years of running a shit show of a business, but doing great work, I'd imagine. Yeah, the work was good doing, mate, I was it's-. This came up at a conversation at lunch today Like our industry rewards us for doing bad like running a bad business.
Speaker 2:You're saying it's successful. So in 2012, I won the Master Builders Brisbane Award for Rising Star. So back when I won that award, it wasn't an award that you filled out an entry for. It was an award that you filled out an entry for. It was an award that we had multiple homes entered in the awards. I think we won four other awards that year, including Best Home over $2 million and so I won what was called a Rising Star Award, and the Rising Star Award was awarded to someone that master builders saw to be running a good business, building great products, all these types of things, and so just to reiterate that I won that in 2012. 2012 was a year that I went into Christmas holidays with anxiety and depression and was ready to shut the business down, and so, on top of winning the Master Builders Awards, we had 10 of our houses in the top 100 homes in Brisbane.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of my supplies because you're telling me how many hours?
Speaker 2:a week were you working? I couldn't even tell you. Probably 80 plus I had, because I was turning over millions of dollars. So I was spending millions of dollars with my suppliers. So my suppliers were taking me on overseas holidays. I was getting asked to speak at luncheons. Everyone was rewarding me, and yet, behind the scenes, our business was terrible.
Speaker 2:2012 was a year that we thought we were going to lose everything the banks were trying to take. We couldn't pay our bills. We had terrible cash flow, all the years of bad money management and tax bills and those things. It all caught up with me, and so for me, it was like on one side, I got the industry rewarding me and telling me how well I'm doing, and on the other side, I've got my accountant and my wife and some advisors saying, duane, you're not running a good business, you can't afford to be doing this, like you need to cut back. So I completely understand why so many people in our industry really struggle to see what they need to do to better their business and to better themselves. Because and let's face it, like these days with Instagram, like there was no Instagram when I was like back, when I was doing this.
Speaker 1:You weren't making mistakes, so here it is. Here's a person who wasn't making mistakes, building well, hardworking.
Speaker 2:Oh look, we had a few mistakes.
Speaker 1:Some people would have let you down, but it was unintentional.
Speaker 2:I was trying to my best. I was trying to do everything right.
Speaker 1:You add to that equation the workload that you're doing and more than the minor mistakes you had. So some major mistakes, some callbacks, the misuse of contracts that we shouldn't be bound by. The contracts that we're bound by now are terrible. Most of the regulations we're bound by are unsympathetic Performance solutions we don't control. So you've got to spend a lot of unnecessary money if a deemed to satisfy solution can't be employed. If there's any uncertainty, often it comes back to the builder to put unpaid time in to fix the problem.
Speaker 2:One of my biggest mistakes, gerry was I believe that I so we used to, I used to chase jobs. I wanted to be known for doing some of the bigger good look like I don't know, just flash homes, I guess you'd call them, and I didn't understand, like I just thought, I got given a set of here's, an approved set of drawings. Go and build it, and so all of the big defects that we have had over the years that have cost me, I would say, somewhere between probably $600,000 and $800,000 combined.
Speaker 1:You're listening architects and designers to this.
Speaker 2:Were due to. Like. I did it. I built the. I did the Maspurt drawings so I've just I mentioned.
Speaker 2:So one of them was a large external tile deck on a third level that we ended up getting held responsible for, and it turned out it was an engineering fault because the joists had been undersized and the deck sagged. One was well, probably the most expensive one off was a pool. We had a pool that had been designed with a 14-meter long waterfall edge. The pool was basically facing the perfect direction, that it was in the sun all day, and they selected black tiles, and so I knew it wasn't right, but it didn't matter. The client wanted what they wanted. It was specified and because me, as a builder, went ahead and and did the job. So what was happening like? Two years later we had to go back and completely jackhammer the full interior lining of the pool, strip all the tiles off it and basically fully black interior no, so it had a.
Speaker 2:It had a light pebbled interior okay but all the waterfall edge was all tied black. So what was happening? That this? It had cooled down. It'd be cool from night time. The sun would come up and it would heat up the edge all day and then it would go back down and the filter would come on at certain times and the water would go over it. So it was. It was changing temperature a lot and there was so much pressure on the front of the outside of the shell that it popped all the pebble creating off on the inside of the pilscher.
Speaker 1:Oh, so the thermal it was all expanding and contracting.
Speaker 2:No one at the time. We had so many people look at that job and no one. But you were blamed. Well, it come back to. I thought I was fine. I kept pushing back on it and basically looked to the owner like, look, I don't think I've done anything wrong. I'm not sure what's going on here.
Speaker 1:You needed to talk to me. I would have told you inadequate movement joints. I would have looked at the drawings and said that the movement joint should have been here. They should have separated the two substrates.
Speaker 2:They should have looked at the thermal load and well, yeah, but I know that now I didn't know at the time. Yeah, but there are.
Speaker 1:so one of the things that we'll be'll be doing with tools is that we call it the early adopters rule, so you never use a product that hasn't had a decent track record and I should have done that.
Speaker 2:Like now, like these days, I can't believe the amount of specification now when it comes to claddings, tiles, waterproofing, pre-primed timber. That basically says in fine print if you paint this like a dark colour on this product or a black tile, if you lay a black tile over a waterproofing on an external deck, there is no warranty.
Speaker 1:Dark external doors, so dark finishes. So we have a selection tool. So we're pushing a lot of duty back on the architects and the designers on the choices. So if you're choosing something, you need to know the consequence of your choice. Now, obviously, I've already said that we don't have a governing forensic body. The industry doesn't, and that's between all the players. So I don't see a lot of difference between what a designer does, what an engineer does, what a contractor does, what a subcontractor does, what anybody does. We're all doing the same thing. We're building something. So we should all be trying to work out how do we get information about something that's complex before we build it wrong, like you did with that blacktop.
Speaker 2:Well, that's what I'm getting at. I got probably four or five other stories, but all the four or five or six major defects that we've had that have cost us tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. We've followed the drawings and the specification and the way I've always been led to believe is, as a head contractor, as soon as I take responsibility of those stamp plans, I'm responsible for that. So if I go ahead and build something that is wrong, Depending how the contract is constructed.
Speaker 1:and that's what I'd like to simplify. I'd like to make sure that if you are given something and you build in accordance with the drawings and the schedule of finishes, or the choices are wrong and the drawing does not show something that's non-standard Black tiles, for instance I probably would have jointed those at maybe maximum two metres instead of the 4.5. And I certainly would have thought about I don't know whether I would have thought about the transfer of thermal load to pebble creek below yeah, so what?
Speaker 2:um, just to go back to that one. So it it. The client kept asking what was wrong because when they're in the pool it felt like when you pushed on the pebble creek it was moving. Yeah, and I, I kept telling them it couldn't be like you're crazy, and they tried so many photos and stuff you couldn't see it. Anyway, I went out there to look at the site and you could clearly just look in the water and you could see this big bulge and I thought, the wall. When I say huge, you could see that it was maybe 10, 20 mil.
Speaker 1:Yeah, water behind paint.
Speaker 2:And I got in the pool and you could literally push on the pebble creek and it wasn't attached to the concrete shell. There's a bond issue there too, so there may be some issues with the way that Pebble Creek was bonded. So we had all the Pebble Creek companies out there, we had the glue companies out there, we had the company that did the Pebble Creek for us.
Speaker 1:You learned heaps, but you didn't get paid for it and it cost you a fortune.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so long story short, I didn't just jump in and fix it. I got a lot of people out there to give me advice and tried to, but you eventually paid the cost. Well, eventually yeah, I eventually wore the bill for it. Now you?
Speaker 1:had the financial means to deal with that, but it was very unfair and it was due mainly to lack of knowledge. Tools is going to give you about 80% of the answers to prevent that from happening. What we are trying to do with the industry, we're just trying to say if it's non-standard, make sure that somebody's responsible for any of the information that should be either sought or contained in something that's non-standard.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, look, mate, I think you're doing incredible things with the app and I highly highly encourage everyone that listens to this podcast to get on board with it. Like, is there anything you want to add before we wrap up our conversation, mate?
Speaker 1:No, but I do want 1.4 million Australians to man up to change the industry from the bottom up, and it's all of us. It's not in silos of contractors and subbies and architects and designers and certifiers and legislators and teachers. It's all of us. And if we don't do it, we're going to continue to be a laughingstock. We can't have I believe in teamwork but unions that are gouging us we've got to get rid of, but we need to make sure that everybody on the building sites are properly protected. So there's lots to do, but it's in every one of the 1.4 million of us. And I shout out to you, duane, for doing your bit. I'm doing my bit with tools. I think it's a cracker, and so I look forward to all of you using the right tools on your next jobs.
Speaker 2:Jerry, look. Thanks very much for coming on board. Look for all the listeners. Jerry and his team are going to do an incredible deal. So if you use the code LEVELUP20, you will get 20% off the tools app. Look, go out, have a look at the app. It is absolutely awesome. If you run a business, like I do, with multiple teams, like get your supervisors using it, get your carpenters using it it is just absolutely awesome. It is so easy to use and, like I said at the start, this is something like you see so many things coming into our building industry. I believe this is going to make a massive difference. So thanks, Jerry, for coming on. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, dwayne. And this is Ralph. Of course, ralph is in a lot of our socials. He's very, very well. When he was younger he was incredibly popular, but no, but he's in fact he's quite a doggable.
Speaker 2:Very good. As always, likecom 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.