Leadership coach Dan Urquhart returns to The Good Builder Podcast to talk seasons, mission, and the foundations that keep building businesses standing when everything else gets hard.

There is a word that keeps coming back.

Seasons.

Not in a motivational poster sense. Not as a metaphor borrowed from a self-help book. But as a real, practical framework for making sense of what is happening in your business and your life, and what you need to do about it.

When Aaron saw Dan Urquhart post about seasons on social media, it landed. Not because it was new, but because it named something both men had been living through without quite having the language for it.

“I call different periods of my life seasons,” Aaron told Urquhart on the latest episode of The Good Builder Podcast. “You go through them and you learn a lot of stuff.”

Urquhart, founder of leadership and culture consultancy 1000 Feet Deep, is no stranger to this conversation. A former GJ Gardner franchisee who built and sold a successful regional building business, he now works with building business owners to get the foundations right. The kind of foundations, he says, that most builders only think about after the cracks appear.

What Seasons Actually Means for a Builder

Urquhart is quick to clarify that this is not a rigid framework. It is more of an orientation.

“Sometimes we go for really easy periods where the sales are coming through the door, everyone seems to be getting on, the customers are all happy,” he said. “And then there’s other seasons where it’s just a grind, everything’s an issue.”

The challenge is not identifying the season you are in. Most builders can feel that. The harder skill is preparing for the one coming next.

COVID is the obvious case study. When the HomeBuilder boom hit, many builders were already stretched. Supply chains buckled. Trades disappeared. Clients grew frustrated. Businesses that had been operating on informal systems, verbal agreements and experience-based decisions found those foundations inadequate almost overnight.

“It’s not that the issues you face are any less real. They just don’t measure up to what you know you are, who you know you are, and where you know you’re going.” Dan Urquhart

Urquhart’s own regional business at GJ Gardner weathered that period. Not without cost, he is clear about that. But the team held together, build numbers went up, and customer satisfaction remained above 95 per cent. He puts that down entirely to work done before the storm.

“If you start to scramble and do that work during COVID, it would have just been another thing to do and you wouldn’t have had the time or the emotional energy to do it.”

The Foundation That Makes Everything Else a Byproduct

Urquhart keeps returning to three words: leadership, team, and culture.

Not as buzzwords. As the actual operating structure of a business.

Leadership covers how clearly a business owner communicates, how well they set expectations, how empowered their people feel, and how consistently performance is measured. Team covers skillset, mindset, and character. Culture covers capacity, systems and processes, and whether the whole thing holds together under weight.

“Everything else is a byproduct of that,” Urquhart said. “Reputation? Byproduct. Consistency? Byproduct. Teamwork? Byproduct. Communication? Byproduct.”

This matters particularly when conditions tighten. Builders without a clear mission, Urquhart argues, experience every problem as a 10 out of 10. Without a foundation to measure against, there is no way to right-size what is actually happening.

“When you don’t have a really strong mission and a foundation, every problem I faced, even if it was a three, felt like a 10.” Dan Urquhart

With a mission, the same problem stays a three. It can be addressed, learned from, and moved through.

The practical implication for building businesses is direct. A mission is not a slogan on a website. It is the filter every decision runs through. Who to hire, which jobs to take, how to treat a difficult client, when to say no.

Urquhart’s own mission at GJ Gardner was simple: experience quality. That everyone who came into contact with the business would experience quality. Not just the customer. Every trade, every supplier, every team member.

“That touched everything we did,” he said.

The Season We Are Entering Now

Neither Ng nor Urquhart is predicting doom. But both are clear that the Australian construction industry is entering a different season, one that will demand more from building businesses than the last few years have.

Housing targets that are ambitious on paper but face serious delivery constraints. Infrastructure pipelines in Southeast Queensland building toward the Olympics. Material costs still elevated. Trades still stretched. Insolvencies still appearing.

“Please don’t hear me say doom and gloom,” Urquhart said. “What I’m saying is the season’s coming. The question is, what’s it going to demand of you?”

His answer: builders need to double down on the fundamentals right now, not when things get hard. The best time to plant the tree was three years ago. The second best time is today.

That means investing in leadership development, team training, and cultural clarity even when it feels premature or extravagant. Particularly when cash is tight and there is a temptation to pull back.

“In a season what seemingly could look like lack, the best investors ramp it up,” he said. “Now’s the time to be investing.”

What Do You Need to Drop Off, Take Up, and Move On From?

Toward the end of the conversation, Urquhart shifted the frame from business to the person running it.

The seasons that builders carry into new periods, he said, do not stay neatly in the past. Patterns from years of doing everything alone, scar tissue from a business that fell apart, frustration from watching effort go unrewarded. These things travel.

His prompt was simple. Three questions every leader should sit with, particularly at transition points.

What do you need to drop off?

What do you need to take up?

What do you need to move on from?

One client told him he needed to drop off negativity. Years of grinding through a hard startup had quietly shaped how he saw everything. Another said procrastination. He had a good business, knew it could be great, and had kept finding reasons not to make the move.

Urquhart put his hand up too. Transitioning from a long-running building business into a new consultancy, he said he had moved seasons without properly closing the last one. Taking on too much. Reverting to old solo habits even when a capable team was ready to carry more.

“Leadership was never ever meant to be done alone.” Dan Urquhart

This landed particularly hard for Ng, who was candid about his own patterns. The tendency to disappear into work during hard periods. The frustration that fuels gym sessions and social media rants. The way unresolved injustices from earlier seasons show up in how you talk, how you build, and how you lead.

“You carry it into the business decisions, affects your personal decisions, affects the way you talk to your wife sometimes,” he said. “It affects a whole bunch of stuff bigger than what you think it does.”

The Living Case Study

Before closing, Ng flagged something he has been building toward: a builder case study, fully funded by TGB, that will walk through what a properly structured building business actually looks like from the ground up.

Leadership foundations with 1000 Feet Deep. Practical systems. A real builder, in real time, building the right way.

“We want to make them a walking case study of what makes a good builder,” Ng said. “We start with leadership and watch the problems down the track.”

The pitch is direct. Most of the money spent fixing building businesses, Ng argues, is spent too far downstream. Business coaches addressing cashflow and marketing are treating symptoms. The root cause, far more often than acknowledged, is that the leader does not know who they are, what their business is for, or how to build a team around that clarity.

Urquhart agreed. His advice to builders watching this from the sidelines was equally direct.

Identify the season you are in. Invest in the foundations before you need them. Ask yourself the three questions. And do not try to do any of it alone.

Because the season will change. It always does. The only question is whether you will be ready when it does.

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Author: TGB Editorial