You’re working harder, but your bank account tells a different story.
Being a busy custom home builder isn’t always a sign you’re doing well.
If you’re constantly busy but never seem to have enough profit left, you’re experiencing one of the most common frustrations among custom home builders.
Constant busy-ness with little profit often points to deeper issues in your business that are quietly draining your profitability daily. And you’re experiencing one of the most common frustrations among custom home builders.
If you’re working flat out but struggling financially, something fundamental isn’t working.
The longer these issues go unaddressed, the more money you’re losing and the more exhausted you become.
In this conversation, Amelia Lee and Duayne Pearce reveal why so many builders find themselves trapped in this cycle and exactly what you can do about it.
Watch the video now, or read the transcript below. Be sure to also subscribe to the Live Life Build YouTube channel.
Amelia
Duayne, one of the challenges that we regularly hear from builders is…
“I am working all the time, and I have no money left at the end of my jobs”
And that whole thing about not having any time to do anything else except just keep working is a really big problem for so many in the industry, isn’t it?
Duayne
Yeah, look, Amelia, it’s a terrible one. Our industry doesn’t know what they don’t know. And so many builders feel like they’re doing the right thing, like the old word-of-mouth thing’s a good one. Like, everyone thinks word of mouth means you’re doing a good job.
But we’re actually talking to a member about this last week, and like, there are really only two reasons that people are busy.
Number one is that you do great quality work, which is good, but the main reason is that you’re not charging enough. And so many builders out there are just doing work for far less than what they do, what they should be, because they don’t understand their numbers.
But a lot of people are trying to be everyone’s friend, and doing work for family, for friends, for friends of friends, and all that’s doing is creating a lot of problems and not building their bank account up and not getting them the profit that they should have.
“So many builders are just doing things on a day-to-day basis that are literally just… they may as well just be burning their money.”
– Duayne
Amelia
We did this fantastic exercise with our members where I think we put over 100 profitability leaks that we’d identified in a building business, and they were categorised into three categories, so:
- Profitability leaks around not knowing your numbers.
- Profitability leaks around not being able to schedule your time properly. And,
- Profitability leaks around when you’re not working with the right clients using the right process.
And we had this worksheet where we listed out all of these different profitability leaks, and had our members work through and rate themselves based on how significant it currently was a profitability leak in their business or could potentially be.
And it was amazing just to see the light bulbs going off as our members were working through this massive list of all of these different profitability leaks.
And what I think is really interesting is when you think about this analogy, compared to, say, a dripping tap. If a tap is dripping one drip per second, by the end of a year of a tap dripping one drip per second, you’ve got 10 bathtubs worth of water that has just leaked out of that tap.
And that is happening in building businesses every day of the week. And builders just aren’t even aware of what these profitability leaks actually are.
Duayne
It’s unbelievable, because so many of them can be fixed very, very easily. And again, we see it all the time with our members in Live Life Build.
It’s just getting that guidance. It’s getting around the right people and it’s knowing what to look for.
So many builders are just doing things on a day to day basis that are literally just… they may as well just be burning their money. And that’s pretty sad when you think how hard builders have to work to earn money.
So, putting time and energy into understanding where you are losing money in your business. And like you said, it was unbelievable that day at our conference, and just seeing these guys staring at these sheets, and just having all these moments, you could see their eyes changing as they were realising and ticking things off, like the things that they could work on.
But I think the really exciting part was that there were so many in there that they could see they could change very quickly and very easily.
Amelia
And since then, we’ve had members put plugs in a lot of those leaks. And I think this is one of the challenges, too, in the industry.
You often think that you don’t have any money because it’s a big problem. It’s just sort of this big mystery of something that you don’t know, or this silver bullet or this quick fix that’s going to be the thing to turn it around. But if you’re not aware of how to actually audit all of these little things. You’re basically dying this death of a thousand cuts.
And so to be able to see our members identify those things, they could immediately put them into action. And since then, doing that worksheet, we’ve had members able to plug these profitability leaks and see immediate results.
Duayne
We’ve literally had some members save tens of thousands of dollars in what, six weeks? It is incredible. Once you know what you’re looking for and where to spend your time, how quickly you can get results.
Amelia
So, how about you sit down and have an audit of your business? Look at where you’re not knowing your numbers, you’re not scheduling your time, or you’re not working with the right client on the right process.
See if you can identify what profitability leaks you might be having in your business, and what you can put into action to plug those leaks right away.
The Reality Check You Need
If you’re like most builders we work with, you probably recognised several areas where money is slipping through the cracks. The dripping tap analogy hits hard because it’s true; small leaks compound into massive losses over time.
The builder members in our ELEVATE program don’t just get a list of profitability leaks; they get the exact systems, processes, and ongoing support to identify and fix these issues permanently. That’s why our members save tens of thousands of dollars in weeks, not years.
Your business is working harder than it needs to. The question is: Are you ready to work smarter?
Discover how ELEVATE members are turning their profitability leaks into profit streams.