Building, Scaling & Leading an Industry with Anthony McLean from Ambrose Construct Group

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

Any one of your listeners will have this in their business and they’re going, how do we scale? How do we do some things differently? It would have been easy to just to get ourselves, I guess, a little unfocused and take whatever work was on the table. But we went, that’s not what we do. This is what we do. This is our core business. We’re to do really, really well. And then we’re to bring that to our supply chain and our supply chain will preference us over others because we make their life easier to work with us. 

Before we get started, the team here at the Coast and Commerce podcast want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where this podcast is created, the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people. We honour their rich culture of storytelling as we share the inspiring stories of business leaders across the Sunshine Coast. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Let’s get on with the show.

G’day and welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and this is the show where we bring inspiring stories from businesses across the Sunshine Coast to inspire you to do better or grow better or scale better in whatever you do in business on the Sunshine Coast. And one of those businesses that maybe is flying under the radar, maybe you haven’t heard of them or maybe you have, is Ambrose Construction, Ambrose Construct actually here on the coast. We’ve got Anthony McLean here, who is general manager for residential.

Did I get that right, So Anthony’s here because this is a really fascinating story guys. And I think it’s going to inspire you, even if you’re not in the construction industry or if you’re in a related field, I think you’re going to get a lot out of this. So Anthony, welcome to the show. Mate, glad to be here. So tell me your story though. People, I’ve known you for years from previous businesses and things like that, but, and you’ve been on the coast for quite a while, but tell me like, what’s your, what’s your story? Like before Ambrose, like.

What were you doing? Very, very long and twisted journey. When I left school and joined the Queensland police, I actually spent about 14 years in law enforcement, became, was an Intel officer, worked through homicide and the tactical unit and ended up the senior Intel officer at CERT. Then there was an opportunity to leave the police and got headhunted out of the job and ended up going to Canberra. And my business partner at the time was a FBI criminal profiler. So we did, we set up a behavioural consulting company.

So we did a lot of training and a lot of consulting in and around people and people science and how do you move people, how do you do different things. And when I was at homicide, I got interested in a guy by the name of Robert Cialdini. So Bob was the most cited social scientist in the world. And I had the opportunity once I left the police to go to the US and train with him. So I became one of 17 in the world that actually was able to use his behavioural science and theory and I brought it alive if you like. So look to business, how do we bring it onto profit and loss statements and then in the law enforcement space continue to look at how do we get people to tell us things without having to use a telephone book or without having to do those sorts of things but use behavioural science to move people through. The time the tactical unit was about negotiation skills and we may have people held up in houses and how do you actually move them to come outside.

I got right into the people sciences side of things. My mum and dad were here on the coast. Dad ended up as an electrician by trade. He had compressed vertebrae, lost sensation in his fingers. I thought I’ll come back to the coast, be close to mum and dad. At that point, I was consulting to financial services industries, banks, as well as a number of overseas entities. And by chance, I just happened to meet Brett and Melissa Ambrose, whose kids went to the same school as my kids at Emmanuel.

And we got talking one day and Brett said, what do you do? And I told him and he said, you’re a management consultant. I said, yeah, sure, that’ll do. But he asked me who I work for and I said, I work with Suncorp, his biggest client at the time was Suncorp. So I ended up working with Brett and Mel in a consulting capacity. Ambrose building as we were then was an insurance builder. Suncorp was their primary client. They covered every part of Queensland or had a desire to cover every part of Queensland. So the plan we put in place in 2013 very closely represents where we are today. 

We’ve diversified that we work for every insurer in the country. We’re in every state in the country. We’ve got 32 locations. We’ve got over 600 staff. And yeah, it’s really about, I guess, disrupting and challenging the way that insurance repairs are done and how we bring that to the market. So very different place today from where I started off. But it’s all about people and it’s how we engage with our customers. Because the interesting thing we’ve got is our customers actually aren’t our customers.

Our customers are the customers of our insurance clients that we work for. So if we do a good job, they tend to stay with their insurer because they have a good repair experience. If we don’t do a good job, then they may look to go elsewhere. So retention is real challenge. we’ve got a couple of hats that we wear when we’re in someone’s house, which is their castle, and we’ve got to return it back to what it was like before they had an insurance claim, but then also making sure we’re doing the right thing by the insurer and the industry at large.

I mean, it’s an interesting, what you’ve just brought up there, it’s an interesting kind of a challenging way of thinking for traditional businesses where they kind of understand that their client is their client who pays the bills, right, typically. But, you know, as you mentioned there, you’ve kind of got a different model there where you’re serving the clients of your clients, right, which opens up a whole new bunch of challenges as well, right? And I imagine taking you back to Cialdini as well, like he’s most well known for the science of persuasion, right?

I wonder how that kind of factors into the work you do today, but that might be an episode for another time. And it certainly does because it involves people. So yeah. And I think, you know, one of the, one of the key things that people ask us all the time, you know, they say, what are you doing? You’re a builder and you must be. And we’re more so as we were talking about before, we’re in the services industry. We just happen to do building. We do restoration. So it’s really about doing that customer piece well. And I guess the unique thing that we have is

No one really wants an insurance claim when it happens. Your house gets hit by a tree or a car crashes into your house at night and hailstorms that are happening around Southeast Queensland at the moment. No one wants them. And the other thing is they don’t know what to do when they have a claim. So they’ll lodge a claim. And then when we get introduced by the insurer, they didn’t pick us. So if you do a reno or a new home build, you go through the process, you set your budget, you pick the builder and you work closely with them. For an insurance claim, you get given a builder that you’ve never met and you don’t know what’s going on. 

So the level of uncertainty is extremely high. And one of the things in the science persuasion is really about how you deal with people at points of uncertainty. So yeah, it works in e-commerce and people buying online and those sorts of things, but it equally happens in day-to-day life and just making sure we get through decision inertia, make sure that we’re actually moving people. Cause there’s something in our industry, which is you can cash settle your claim, which means that you, the insurer does a scope and then you get a price and you go, yep, I’ll take that money. So this is the American model.

The insurer gives you the money and you’re on your own. You’re going to go and find a builder. Because we do this all day, every day, our rates, we’ve got our trades dialled in, we’ve got three and a half thousand subbies around the country. We only do insurance repairs. We do all day, every day to go and compete. We don’t compete against new home builders because they do that every day to compete against us in insurance repairs. It’s a little challenging. So when customers take that money and go, great, actually, I’m going to go out and look after myself. It’s actually not the best outcome because when they walk away from the guarantee of their insurer.

But two, they then got to walk the tight rope of engaging trades and looking after it themselves and dealing with supply and demand pressures in the construction industry and the market at large. So yeah, I think we do take our responsibility pretty heavily and we honestly believe the best outcome for a customer is for us to do their repair. And that’s why we’re in business and that’s why we do what we do is really, we talk about, we look after people, not just claims and because we’re in people’s houses. 

So it’s an important part of what we do, but that’s why we’re driven by service and customer service primarily. Yeah, very cool. Look, I mean, I’ve had that experience myself when we had our roof replaced after some storms a number of years back and we had that same dilemma, that same decision of, know, do we go with the, you know, insurance builder, you know, and that guarantee from the insurer and all of that, know, lack of headache potentially, or do we take that payout and find our own builder and you know, we went the easy option, right? 

And it sounds like we made the right option. But I think this story and the reason why, you know, I brought you on the podcast here today is not to really talk insurance as much as you might like to, is really it’s a business growth story, right? And I think that’s what I think for other people in business on the Sunshine Coast. I think that they’ll learn a lot and gain a lot from hearing the Ambrose story. So on behalf of, you know, the Ambroses, you know, can maybe just take us back to,

This is obviously before you joined the company, but what was Ambrose building at, I guess, at the foundation or at the start, was just a small building company. So the nebulous Brett was a mature age carpentry apprentice who then went out, lived on the Darling Downs, was doing higher end Queenslander type renovations, but they don’t get through a handful a year. And then one of the things when he came out of his time, he actually went, this is really hard work just to get through just a little bit every year. and then got into volume. So he went and worked for a project builder.

And what that taught him was how to scale, how to actually do what you do, but scale it to make it really work for you. And then in 2008, he was introduced by a friend to the insurance industry, Mackay Floods had just happened, they couldn’t get builders. So he went up to Mackay and he ended up working for a national builder. And what he did was he went in and ran jobs. Now the model of 2008 is exactly the same as the model today. We have a building supervisor who speaks to the customer, who looks after the repair, schedule it from start to finish. 

The idea of going from high end quality, which was the architectural start through to volume. How do you make it work as a volume builder? And you know, for the listeners on your podcast, every person in business is trying to look at how do I take what I do? And if it’s just my time and it’s not scalable, then I’m going to run myself into the ground. If I make it scalable, how do I keep it personal? How do I actually get to where I need to go? So our model was really, so when I joined Brett and Mel in 2013, was 29 people.

We’re in a small office in primary school court and we got, how do we actually take what we’re doing and make it bigger? So our biggest after cyclone Yasi, 2010, 2011, you know, at the same time, Southeast Queensland had the Brisbane flood. A lot of builders went South cause it was easy. Brett went North cause it wasn’t easy and ended up working in, in Cardwell and really sort of rebuilding the town. But as part of that, they went from quite a small crew to then doing large amounts of repairs. And then when Brett came back, he said, right, we’ve got to really get into the tech space. 

Because at that point in time, he was and self confessed, he was writing on a piece of paper in a manila folder. Fast forward two years, he was actually then developing in our system that we had at the time. And we actually reached out, we couldn’t find a system that was off the shelf. So we got one in New Zealand, and we actually got too big for them. And we said, we’d pay for developers. And they said, no, can you go away? You’re too big for us.

So we actually then found a low code workflow management system out of the US that we today, it automates 150,000 tasks every day. We’ll run 50,000 insurance repairs. We’ve got 600 staff. So really that what Brett did as an individual, we’ve now scaled to 130 supervisors every day running repairs in people’s homes right around the country. And it is more, you’re right. It’s not about insurance, it’s not about building. What it’s about is understanding what do you do? Hhow do you scale what you do and how can you use technology to help? And so even today we look at AI and we go, AI is great. I like to make it hallucinate because it’s funny. So you just keep asking questions and see what happens. If I created Terminator, I apologize for that. think I’ve upset a few Indians. But what we’re looking to do is how do we make the role of our staff easier? How can they answer questions faster? Do that sort of stuff. So we’re always, you know, we’ve called ourselves a disruptor, but we’re probably more so an innovator.

It’s really about how do we do what we do every day better? And what’s that? We call it, we’re a high performance company. So to be based on the Sunny Coast, we’re not for everyone. Not everyone is our type of employee. We don’t do work from home and people look at that and they go, well, does that mean we’re out of step? Are we out of touch with the rest of the business community? And the reason we didn’t is we have a lot of emotionally laden calls where if a customer gets a claim declined or this thing’s not going well.

And for our staff to have that high support with other people around them. So we’ve got that scale is the ability to actually get through, know, we could have a, in towns or floods, we scope two and a half thousand flooded houses in five weeks. In the Brisbane floods, we scoped over six and a half thousand in six weeks. So it’s really about taking what we know in the technology space and the service and looking after customers, but to actually get through that volume as quickly as we can while delivering a really good quality product.

I want to take you back to potentially some of the base principles that you’re sharing here is like, and I’m making some assumptions that in those earlier days, like 10 years ago in the business, when the view for the company was to scale and there was obviously an opportunity with the, with the Yasi, cyclone and things like that. And there’s been other kind of large scale, events around Australia and in Queensland since. So you’ve got this opportunity as a builder to, to, to do a lot of work, right. Very rapidly.

So rapid scale, lots of revenue, I guess, coming in, lots of outgoings as well, of course. But, you know, I think some businesses would approach that as, like, let’s just make hay while the sun shines. You know, but it sounds like that’s not what Ambrose did. Sounds like you guys had took some strategic decisions during those moments of growth to set yourself up for the next stage. Would that be right? Absolutely. So, you know, when in around COVID, every day, you know, we have the ability where we’ll go in to do an insurance claim someone’s house. 

And I go, can you build a deck? Can you actually paint the rest of my house? And absolutely, we could. We could say, yeah, we could do that, but it’s not our core business. So to get distracted by that and remove ourselves away, we then start to deal with moms and dads. We started to deal with moms and dads, budgets and financial problems. We work for people who pay their bills, and that’s insurance companies. But what that means for us though, is because we know that they pay and they pay on time, we pay our trades in 12 days. 

So there’s still others who are paying their trades in 30 days end of month. So if we’re going to our trades and saying, look, we want you to work for us on reduced rates, because cost of living is a real thing. Affordability of insurance is a real thing. And when we talk to people and say, as a builder, the second biggest builder in the country, and we sit there and go, we actually have a role in containing affordability issues. And by doing that, it’s repairing a good quality product at the right price, not letting that blow out.

So when we can go to our trades and say, we’re use our tech and the full job will be scheduled from start to finish. You’ll turn up and your materials will be there for you. You get it done, they have to log into our app. They do our safety induction on site. They read the safety system and they get their purchase orders. They do their work. They take photos, it’s completed. We’ve got a multi-point virtual assessing tool so we can ring in and talk to them while they’re on site. And as soon as they complete that, give us their photos and upload their invoice, they get paid. So from a from a trade perspective, we’re streamlining and taking some of the pressures they have around cashflow and what that looks like. But on the flip side, when something like the hailstorms happen, we have trades ringing up because they know that we pay within 12 days. We are organised, we are structured. So we’ve taken that, as you said, any one of your listeners will have this in their business and they’re going, how do we scale? How do we do some things differently? It would have been easy to get ourselves, I guess,

a little unfocused and take whatever work was on the table, but we went, that’s not what we do. This is what we do. This is our core business. We’re gonna do it really, really well. And then we’re gonna bring that to our supply chain and our supply chain will preference us over others because we make their life easier to work with us. So if we’re too hard to work for, they won’t, especially when we’re asking them to do it cheaper. But if we can have it be structured, organised, well planned, and we pay fast, then they’ll work for us every day of the week.

And we bring that to small communities right across the country. There’s also, I believe, a bit of a moat that you’ve built like deliberately around Ambrose, the fact that with the technology in particular, that it kind of makes it hard for other people to compete, so to speak, right? Particularly if you can do things more efficiently and faster and look after your trades better and all of that. What role does has that technology solution that you explained before had in scaling that growth and making it more sustainable. It’s been enormous. And I think, you know, when we talk to people about what we do and they say, what are you doing? You’re a builder, right? We say, yeah, we’ve got 30 devs in our IT team and then we’ve got six help desk guys and they’re going, but you’re a builder. Why have you got 30 devs? And we go, well, cause we built our entire system. We built all the third party apps that plug onto the side. And you know, when it first started, we were going out and we were using body shop consultants who you were paying a daily rate to who may not be in your business, or they weren’t in our business every day. 

So they’d go away and they’d come back a couple of weeks later and you’d have to go through the re-education process all the time about what we’re doing and where we are. Our staff today that live and breathe what we do. We had a meeting with some guys who fly up from Sydney just to review some of our workflow and stuff we were doing. Cause they had a couple of efficiency challenges and we said, look, we’ll walk you through what we do because we know them and they’re really looking to get out of a problem.

And our IT guys came in and they could have been Brett, they could have been a builder, you know, like, because as a developer, they fundamentally understand what we’re doing every day. Now that’s not for everybody, right? And certainly not to get to 30, but one of the things that we did that really made a difference is when we identified the new platform that we’re going to use, and we went to the Australian distributor and said, do you know of an Australian developer that we could bring in and not pay a body shop rate, but pay a salary?

And we found that person and he was our patient zero. He was the guy that actually changed the path of what we were doing technology wise because what that enabled us to do is to really invest and give the knowledge to him. And then as we brought on more and more people, we could really specialise. So we went down a path where we had developers who just worked with particular and still do work with particular teams. And they know the jobs that the people in that team do equally, if not better than the people doing the role.

So I think that differentiator was we were able to really scale and take, if we can take away the keystrokes, if we can take away the load and if we can make the job more efficient, make it more enjoyable, people have a better time at work, but they can actually just get done faster. I think the one, one of the key elements to what we’ve done is, and if your listeners, if it means anything to them, I’d say, look at your life cycle. Look at how, and.

It’s not about getting through or rushing through stuff. It’s about how do you make yourself more efficient? Because the more efficient you are, the more time you have, the more work you can do, the more productive you are. And you know, if you look at, and people use the analogy all the time, look at an F1 racing team, for example, they’re looking to shave milliseconds off what they do. And we will sit within the business daily and go, we’ve got a task that takes four minutes to do. What if we could do it in 30 seconds? And know, developers will then unpack that. And then to take that task, and go from four minutes to 30 seconds. And you do that hundreds of times a day. You don’t need to go and employ more staff. You don’t need to go and find more people. You’ve just made your staff much more efficient and you’ve taken that load and friction out of their day. So that engagement, the wellbeing, the productivity, the sense of achievement, it all comes from really understanding what we do. But for us, it was bringing that resource in-house and sharing what it is that we do and let them show us what they do to help us work together and do it better.

There’s definitely some takeaways in that even just if the key action for someone watching or listening is to just, you know, step outside of their business for a bit and look in and say, you know, audit those touch points, audit those things that are potentially taking time. I know that this has been, you know, a real scaling story as well over the last, say, 10 years. So you mentioned, you know, starting as a small scale builder, but now I think you mentioned 600 and something staff across Australia now. So can you give us a sense of the scale of the team and locations now for Ambrose Construct. 

Yeah, so we’re 623, we’re across 32 locations around the country, head offices at Kunda Park on the Sunny Coast. But we merged within in 2022, we merged with another insurance builder called Construct Services. So we brought Ambrose Building and Construct Services together and it was a merge, it wasn’t an acquisition and we became Ambrose Construct Group. So now we open up, chase the sun model, we open up in the east and we put to bed in the west. That just means we’re on our phones more often for our clients and our customers.

So that scale piece naturally, when you bring two builders together, you go, right, you just got more staff. It brings with it all sorts of different challenges and you’re bringing together values and cultures and how do people fit and where do they go? But one of the things that we’ve really looked to do is we employ our field-based staff in the towns that they live and work. So in Cairns, we’ve got three building estimator supervisors. They know the place. When Cyclone Jasper hit they were walking around the streets when there was no people and you know, was over the public holiday last Christmas. 

But they know who the supplies are they know how challenging it is to get Cabinetry and joinery and those and they have solutions, you know So I think it really is meaningful when someone locally can have a conversation with a customer in the town that they work in And so that scale piece here was about the merge and it was bringing people together but it was about we we weren’t to. It was going to take a little bit of time and we’d ruffle a few feathers by the way that we stuck to some pretty strong principles. But out of that today, so we just had an offsite last week and we had 80 of our leaders offsite out at Somerset Dam and it was really about bringing us together and saying, what is our identity? What are we here for? And it’s about becoming the best. That’s what we want to be. don’t know we’ll ever arrive because perfection is not a thing. But it was now that we come together, the people that are here two years post merge, they want to be here.

They see where we’re going, they understand what we’re doing, they understand our value set and they share our values. So I think now it’s easier when we bring people in. Our interview processes for our jobs are a little bit weird. I think we speak more than the candidate that comes in because not only are we interviewing them, but they’re interviewing us and we need this to be a values based connection because we’re dealing with people who are in a situation they don’t want to be in being our customers, they don’t know what they’re doing and they didn’t pick us. So we can’t teach people to care and we can’t teach people to work hard. 

So I think that targeted recruitment, bringing in the right person, supporting them, know, our 80 leaders once a month, we pull them out and we’ve got an emerging leaders program and it’s really about how do we help them develop? Because you get really good doers and we promote them into being managers and we go, now you should be a leader, but how do they actually make that journey themselves? So we’re really trying to take that cohort nationally on that journey with us. And then the other really exciting thing is they panic and they go, I’m gonna walk out and leave my staff to do the job and go, but that’s where your two ICs, that’s where your team, that next level down, they get to step up and you empower them. 

And it’s the safest environment they can be in, because you’re still in the building. You’re not going anywhere, but it lets them actually develop. So we’ve got some really young leaders who are embracing the opportunities they get once a month just to run the show. And I think that’s pretty cool that we can do that. Yeah, very cool. You mentioned you got, I think it’s over 200 staff in Kunda Park alone across the two buildings. So, you know, I would say that I don’t have stats on this, but probably puts you in one of the larger employers on the Sunshine Coast in that way. 

So, you know, why the Sunshine Coast? You know, why continue to build your head office of a national company here on the coast? Yeah, and it’s a really good question because, know, it’s easy for us. We could have when we merged and we said we could have gone to Sydney, we could have gone to Melbourne because we’ve got significant facilities in those areas. But we very deliberately looked at the Sunny Coast and wanted one. It’s good. It’s great. How good is it? You know, you get to go have a surf and have a swim. We’ve got plenty of guys and girls that embrace the beach weather. But I think one of those things as a regional employer, if you like, you know, we’ve been growing the pool around the Sunny Coast for a long time. People move here because it’s a great place to be. We don’t have to do the drive of an hour and half to Brizzy every day. You don’t have to sit on the train. We get people now that drive from Brizzy to the Sunny Coast to come to work, which is exciting. 

But I think what it’s enabled us to do is really be part of the community, really embed ourselves. But a number of years ago, when we were in the Innovation Centre together, you know, there was a chat there where they were talking about that Google had voted the Sunny Coast one of the best technological places to be or something like that. And we really looked at that and said, if we’re going to be a services industry, we’ve got 30 developers, we need to be able to be in the place where there is the talent. And so I think some of that’s been driven by, we can support the community by being a major employer kids don’t have to leave home to get a good job. And we’re working with Construction Schools Queensland to bring on apprentices. We’ve got people through Cert IVs and Business Administration. We’ve got accountants, we’ve got IT people. We’ve got all sorts. So we go, we heavily go out to all the school programs as well. So Michelle, our HR manager, Carl, our OD manager, they’ll go out and they’ll actually engage with school kids and bring them into our office and go, you might think we’re a builder. Come and have a look at all the TV screens that we’ve got. And it’s not about the TV screens. It’s about them going wow, there’s actually, didn’t even know this industry was here. 

And I didn’t even know that there was 200 people in Kunda Park working in a services industry that I can turn up to. And I can work with the biggest insurers in the country every day and make a difference to people’s lives and be 10 minutes from the beach. And for some of them, affordability, as we said before, it’s a challenge. We’ve got kids that are still, and I say that in the most polite word, just because of my age, but we’ve got people that are still living at home with mum and dad. 

It’s an awesome opportunity for them to get a leg up. They got a great job. They’re working with some really meaningful tasks every day, but it’s allowing them to save to get into the property industry as well. So we sort of see it as a bit of a, it’s an ecosystem and we’re really, really invested in the Sunny Coast. And, know, I think every single one of us that live here, it’s awesome that we can actually fly in and out of the Sunny Coast airport as well. Do a lot of daily trips to Sydney and Melbourne. You know, I think that’s the more that the Sunny Coast develops and that’s really gonna help businesses like ours, not only attract the right talent to the Sunny Coast, retain the right talent, but also leverage and tell people there are jobs here for you that you don’t need to travel into Brizzy to do or into a metro capital city. Yeah, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that there aren’t those opportunities on the Sunshine Coast and perhaps that there didn’t used to be or there were less, but that’s definitely changing. 

Companies like Ambrose Construct and other major employers on the coast are making a difference there for sure. And it’s more than just, you know, you’re in the trades kind of industry and the construction industry, right? you know, but you hire much more than people in construction, right? In trades. So there’s opportunities there that people probably aren’t aware of. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we can’t do what we do without good trades, you know, so we need really good functioning, healthy trade industry. 

The other thing that we really acknowledge is that you know, if we take the engineered stone band that happened on the 1st of July, and then they rolled out the further restrictions on the 1st of September, there was smaller trades who knew it was a thing, but didn’t really know because the different state government entities weren’t 100 % clear on the framework and what would happen. We’ve got 11 in our safety team. So we had a GM of safety on daily basis doing updates and alerts, and we’re pushing them out to our trades to go, hey, guess what? This is where we’re at now. Yep, you do have to, we do have to tell the regulator what we’re doing in these instances.

So we took the heavy lifting for our trades and we do that quite frequently where we’ll give them updates on product recalls or we’ll give them training on those sorts of things. And people will say to us, but they’re not your employees. That comes at a cost and we go, but it’s a cost we’re willing to make because without them, we can’t do our job. so, Brett being a builder himself was all about paying trades fast and looking after trades. He’s very much a trader giving back to trades. 

And we work really heavily with mates in construction really big and active in mental health space. There’s a lot of suicide that happens in the construction industry and we’re bringing on apprentices and we’re trying to really look after them. So it’s about realising we’re part of the whole system and that’s why rarely we don’t identify ourselves as a builder. We’re a services company that just happens to do building and restoration. 

Yeah, very cool. You mentioned the benefits, the pros of building and scaling a business here and scaling a team on the Sunshine Coast. But what are the challenges? Many, many, many challenges. What are the key challenges? And I think every single person listening here would go through exactly the same thing. You need a new staff member. And then you’ve got a certain budget or you’ve got a certain expectation of what you might be able to pay and meet the market. But cost of living on the Sunny Coast is hard. Affordable housing is hard. So we’ve got to really take into account where we’re drawing those those staff members from and how we support them. 

We’ve gone through periods and sort of even off the sunny coast where we’ve had our offices in some of our regional locations, which are houses, and we’ll allow our staff to live in there for three, six months until they can actually find somewhere to live. So we’ve got to really try and support them. So I think one of the big challenges here on the sunny coast is affordable housing. think for our estimated supervisors on the road, the road’s becoming more congested, you know. 

So our bookings team and our scheduling, they’ve got to be efficient. We’ve got to think about, we contribute to traffic on the road as well. So we’re really looking at how do we manage our workflow, our bookings with customers, we horrify the guys in the state because our first deployment of the morning is at seven o’clock and the guys in Melbourne go, that’s too early, it’s still dark. In Queensland, everyone’s been up at four o’clock, they’ve had a surf and probably three cups of coffee. Seven o’clock’s late, right? So I think we’ve got the opportunity to really embrace the lifestyle. 

But the challenge with it is just making sure we can continue to attract the right talent to the Sunny Coast. Cause as you said, they don’t expect us to be here. The fact that we’ve been here for over 10 years now, people that are in our industry, we’ve employed a lot of people and we’re not for everybody. It’s really fast paced. But if you’re out banging up frames at a new home, you’re not necessarily standing next to a customer who’s crying because their house burned down or those sorts of things. So it is emotionally charged and you know, our industry is not for everyone.

So we’ve got to go through that recruitment process and those sorts of things. So, you know, we’d like to think that the pool is never going to be drained because we continue to have people move to the Sunshine Coast. So we just have to make sure that as they come here, you know, we’ve always got people on Facebook jobs and those sorts of places saying, hey, people looking for work saying, consider working in the insurance industry. Yeah. Well, it’s been a hell of a journey over the last, you know, 10 years plus, right? For Ambo’s construct and obviously kudos to Brett.

Mel as well. Brett, did I get that right? you’re right. Yeah, kudos to Brett and Melissa as well for really driving that and building that company that’s supporting so many people across the coast and to you as well for the impact you’ve had in the last 10 years. But just in, well, more than 10 years, 2013, right? So 12 years, nearly. Crazy. So just as we wrap up here, I’m really interested, what’s the vision for Ambrose Construct now? Like you’ve made some big moves, you’ve merged, you’ve continuing to grow. 

You’re staying here on the coast, I hope. Yep, we’re definitely staying. So tell us, what’s the vision, Sav, in the next five, 10 years? Yeah. And I think, you know, people turn on the TV or however they digest the news, you know, we’ve got inquiries into the floods, we’ve got natural weather events going on all over the place, we’ve got affordability issues in and around insurance. And I think one of the things that we’re really big advocates for is doing things better. So we’re looking globally at products that we can bring into Australia. 

We’ve used a product called Wedi Board, is, you know, Wedi is a product out of Germany, I think they’re a four or five billion dollar company. have like 500,000 bathroom installs every year and less than 1 % fails. And it’s always because the contractor puts it in upside down. But the board itself is waterproof. So rather than put a waterproof membrane on that could fail if you prick it with a screw or you drop something on it, you have to punch the whole board out for it to compromise the waterproofing. comes with a, we were.

We’re the only insurance builder that’s done the master installer program. So for us, we’ve got a 20 year warranty on that. So if we can bring products into the market that most people otherwise wouldn’t use at scale, and we can make people’s houses more resilient. So if there is an event down the track, they may not have to have their full bathroom ripped out. If we can think about the products that we’re using, from an eco perspective, I had a conversation just before I came here and said, how are we managing the recycling process when we take metal off roofs and…

air conditioning covers and hot water systems. And we know what we’ve always done, but how do we do it better? We’re really trying to find people that can recycle solar panels. They don’t exist. They’re just that scale. They’re not here. So I think for us, the next step is how do we continue to do what we do at the same quality that we do? How do we continue to engage and employ really good people? How do we use AI to take good people but deliver a great outcome because we can help it?

You know, in the drafting process or writing reports and doing those sorts of things. But then how do we bring different products to Australia? How do we work with some really, really smart people? How do we keep the good thing about having 30 developers in-house? We are not short on ideas. So, you know, the IT guys every day are looking at little innovations, little changes, little tweaks, faster technologies, cutting edge programs that people have not necessarily heard of. And they’ve given an environment to give it a run. 

I think the future for us is really bright. We will continue to do exactly what we’re doing. We will broaden our range, I’m sure, and we’ll do more adjacencies. But I think if we can continue, we’re not scared of change, but we don’t change for change sake. So if we can continue to do stuff better and faster and give a better quality outcome, yeah, that’s sort of what’s on the radar for us for the next five to 10. And I think, you know, there’s a number of businesses around the sunny coast that inspire us as well. 

We look at how they’re shaping global innovation and thought and practice. So, you know, we’re very much about, we might be based on the sunny coast from head office perspective, but we’re really influencing nationally and looking globally to see how we can actually support and drive the industry to somewhere that it’s not potentially thought it was going to go on the short term. I love it. Ambrose Construct Group, if I can get it out correctly.

Definitely a journey to watch as you move forward over the next five to 10 years and beyond as well. And thanks for coming on and sharing the story. I hopefully it was inspiring and at least just opened the eyes of people listening and watching to know the great work that you guys are doing here on the coast. So thanks for joining me. No problem, it’s awesome. And for you guys watching or listening, make sure to subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube or follow on the podcast app. That’s your following on and we’ve got season four. 

Well, that actually wraps up season three of the Coast and Commerce podcast. We’ve got season four coming, which will be hitting your feeds in early January, 2025. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but it’s nearly here. So we’ll see you in season four for another amazing bunch of great inspiring businesses here on the Coast and Commerce podcast. See ya.